Pøedmìt: Re: [world-vedic] Help correct Wikipedia entries on Hinduism and Vedas
Od: Genghis1291 <genghis@comcast.net>
Datum: Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:22:08 +0200 (CEST)
Komu: vediculture@yahoogroups.com

Someone has taken the trouble of compiling a lot of the recent "peer-reviewed" research that exposes the anti-Hindu bias of linguistic or Indo-European scholars.   See long mail below for contents of research which I am also uploading as a file to this group. It is disgusting to me that the lay person visiting Wikipedia for introductory information on Hindu scripture is presented with two centuries of colonial or  linguistic or evangelical trash in the name of "scholarship", and these same idiots have taken control of the content.



Indo-European Linguistics (IEL), a belief system; reclaiming  history of bharatiya languages


For one who has abandoned craving and is free from grasping, who is skilled in etymology and terms, knowing the groupings and sequences of letters, this is the final birth. This one is called the Great Being, the Great Sage. Dhammapada (24.19) 

 
Abstract

It is good to see IEL (Indo-European Linguistics) proponents starting to question their own discipline vigorously, because this indicates a possibility, some hope that IEL studies will soon get dumped into the dustbin of history! A new paradigm has to emerge for language studies and it appears that such a paradigm can indeed emerge based on the definition of language as a social contract and NOT as a genetically immutable evolutionary phenomenon. With such a defining framework, language studies can become sub-sets of studies related to history of thought, cultural traditions of many interacting communities and their synthesized, fluid, changing world-view, of the adaptations/innovations by language-speakers in a changing socio-cultural-environmental milieu. Further researches on Kashmiri language are likely to lead to the delineation of proto-vedic continuum. See notes on Kashmiri language at http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ajhwbkz2nkfv_628tcdng6 [defunct]

 

Belief system of IEL

 

The belief system is articulated effectively by William Jones who is considered the founder of Indo-European Linguistics. Here are some quotations from his discourses which are eloquent and profound, governed by the conviction that Moses (Musah) was, in fact, narrating history. (Thanks to Arvind Kumar for the original pages of the book from which these quotations are excerpted; cf. http://www.sabha.info/research/aif.html ) 

Discourses delivered before the Asiatic Society, Vol. 2 (The first 10 links are from William Jones's discourse delivered in 1792, the last link is from his 1784 work.) http://www.sabha.info/research/aif.html#bible  

 

"The establishment of the only human family after the deluge; and its diffusion." (Discourse IX, p.1) 

"Now I admit without hesitation the aphorism of Linuaeus, that `in the beginning God created one pair only of every living species, which has a diversity of sex…'"(Creation of God, p.2) 

"The Nature, of which simplicity appears a distinguishing attribute, does nothing in vain, is a maxim of philosophy; and against those who deny maxims, we cannot dispute…but it is true, that one pair at least of every living species must at first have been created; and that one human pair was sufficient for the population of our globe in a period of no considerable length…increase of numbers in geometrical progression…generations of men in two or three thousand years. It follows, that the Author of Nature…created but one pair of our species…must all have proceeded from one pair; and if perfect justice he, as it is most indubitably, an essential attribute of GOD, that pair must have been gifted…"(One human pair, p. 3) 

"…so that in less than three thousand years, the world would exhibit the same appearances which we may actually observe on it in the age of the great Arabian impostor. On that part of it to which our united researches are generally confined, we see five races of men peculiarly distinguished, in the time of Muhammed, for their multitude and extent of dominion; but we have reduced them to three, because we can discover no more that essentially differ in language, religion, manners, and other known characteristics; now these three races, how variously soever they may at present be dispersed and intermixed, must (if the preceding conclusions be justly drawn) have migrated originally from a central country, to find which is the problem proposed for solution. " (Three thousand year mode, Migration from Central Asia p. 4-5) 

"Thus then have we proved that the inhabitants of Asia, and consequently as it might be proved, of the whole earth, sprang from three branches of one stem...The most ancient history of that race, and the oldest composition perhaps in the world, is a work in Hebrew…it is ascribed to Musah…After describing with awful sublimity the creation of this universe, he asserts, that one pair of every animal species was called from nothing into existence; that the human pair were strong enough to be happy, but free to be miserable; that, from delusion and temerity, they disobeyed their supreme benefactor, whose goodness could not pardon them consistently with his justice; and that they received a punishment adequate to their disobedience, but softened by a mysterious promise to be accomplished in their descendants. We cannot but believe, on the supposition just made of a history uninspired, that these facts were delivered by tradition from the first pair, and refuted by Moses in a figurative style…The sketch of antediluvian history, in which we find many dark passages, is followed by the narrative of a deluge, which destroyed the whole race of man except four pairs; an historical fact admitted as true by every nation to whose literature we have access…"(Most ancient history written by Musah, Bible is history, pp.6-7) 

"Let a general flood, however, be supposed improbable, in proportion to the magnitude of so ruinous an event, yet the concurrent evidences of it are completely adequate to the supposed improbability; but, as we cannot here expatiate on those proofs, we proceed to the fourth important fact recorded in the Mosaic history; I mean the first propagation and early dispersion of mankind in separate families to separate places of residence. Three sons of the just and virtuous man, whose lineage was preserved from the general inundation, traveled, we are told, as they began to multiply, in three large divisions variously subdivided; the children of Yafet seem, from the traces of Sklavonian names, and the mention of their being enlarged, to have spread themselves far and wide, and to have produced the race which, for want of a correct appellation, we call Tartarian; the colonies formed by the sons of Ham and Shem appear to have been nearly simultaneous…while the former branch, the most powerful and adventurous of whom were the progeny of Cush, Misr, and Rama, (names remaining unchanged in Sanscrit, and highly revered by the Hindus) were, in all probability, the race which I call Indian…Now these primeval events are desribed as having happened between the Oxus and Euphrates, the mountains of Caucasus and the borders of India, that is, within the limits of Iran… "(All humans are descended from Noah's three sons who survived biblical flood, Indians descended from Noah's son Ham, pp. 8-9) 

"…travelers appear unanimous in fixing the site of ancient Babel. Thus, on the preceding supposition, that the first eleven chapters of the book, which is thought proper to call Genesis, are merely a preface to the oldest civil history now extant, we see the truth of them confirmed by antecedent reasoning, and by evidence in part highly probable, and in part certain; but the connexion of the Mosaid history with that of the Gospel by a chain of sublime predictions unquestionably ancient, and apparently fulfilled, must induce us to think the Hebrew narrative more than human in its origin, and consequently true in every substantial part of it…If Moses then was endued with supernatural knowledge, it is no longer probable only, but absolutely certain, that the whole race of man proceeded from Iran, as from a centre, whence they migrated at first in three great colonies; and that those three branches grew from a common stock, which had been miraculously preserved in a general convulsion and inundation of this globe."(Babel was in Central Asia, humans descended from Noah's sons, p. 10) 

"That the Vedas were actually written before the flood, I shall never believe; nor can we infer from the preceding story, that the learned Hindus believe it…"(Vedas not before biblical flood, p. 89) 

 

I challenge anyone, any IEL expert or believer in PIEL to read aloud and create audio versions of the sample IEL text (many versions) of Schleicher's fable. It is about a goat, yes, goat referred to on an indology research list in excited terms. So much for IEL as evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable 

 

Annex 1 is attached with citations from the following works (1999 to 2006), thanks to Mayuresh Kelkar for the excerpts to provide evidence for the Biblical bases of the belief system of IEL compounded by eurocentric, racist, supremacist ideologies:

1. Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols:  Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

2. Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth:  Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press.

3. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (2001), Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure, Anatoly Liberman (Ed.), translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman, Durham and London:  Duke University Press.

4. Melchert, Craig (2001), "Critical Response to the Last Four Papers," in Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.

Arvidsson provides a thoroughly annotated account of the creation of a myth called an indo-european nation and an indo-european language and demonstrates the unscientific nature of the linguistic enquiries.

Lincoln documents the hypocrisies of so-called scholarship and muddling of myth and theory leading to the non-falsifiability of Indo-European Linguistics making it suspect as a logical, valid method. Without a method to relate observations related to evolution of and changes in languages to other disciplines such as archaeology and cultural evidences, the discipline will be of little explanatory value to understand the past. The patterns of concordant words can result from 1. divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache or 2. convergence from a number of hypothetical protolanguages. To put it simply, IEL provides no method to identify: 1. the direction of the `borrowings' of words from one community to another; 2. the time-periods to which such `borrowings' relate. Thus IEL becomes, by itself, an unreliable method to assist historical, cultural studies.

 

Trubetzkoy was categorical: "This supposition (of descent from a proto-indo-european language) is contradicted by the fact that, no matter how far we peer back into history, we always find a multitude of Indo-European-speaking peoples.  The idea of an Indo-European protolanguage is not absurd, but it is not necessary, and we can do very well without it (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 87)."

Melchert provides a devastating blow, surveying the results of cumulative investigations of IEL. Only four semantics have been reliably reconstructed as relatable to indo-european: horse, yoke, bovine, and wool. Unfortunately, the `horse'  word has five different roots and the region of `South Asia' where horse remains have been found have their own unique words for this beast; sheep became woolly only later than the Neolithic period and the indo-european word identified becomes a late innovation. The word for yoke has morphology uncertainties. This is the sum and substance of the grand-standing contributions made by IEL so far to history and cultural studies.

Koerner summarises the background of language studies in the 19th and 20th centuries: "To return to the 19th century for a moment, racialist and what we now would call `white supremacist' views can be traced without any trouble in many scholarly writings, and to dispel the impression that it was largely a German affair, I could refer to books by American authors where we find such ideas expressed, one book entitled Lectures on the Arya (Pike 1873), another The Aryan Race: Its origin and achievements (Morris 1888), the latter affirming "all the savage tribes of the earth belong to the Negro or Mongolian race, the Caucasian is pre-eminently the man of civilization" (pp.23-24), and that it were these Caucasians who had "perfected the Aryan method of language" (p. 51). (Let us remember, however, that `Aryan' was widely used in lieu of `Indo-European' in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until the early 20th century, and certainly not always with `supremacist' undertones…)" (E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa).

Harvard Donkey Trial

 

In the context of linguistics as a heuristic tool, a trial is ongoing about the differences between an indo-european horse and a Kutchi wild-ass (equus hemionus khur, gurram – meaning horse ! -- in Telugu). The donkey was referred to in The Hindu (a marxist tabloid) by Witzel in a profoundly non-linguistic introduction to zoological creationism and supremacy of the Aryan equus caballus: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/op/2002/03/05/stories/2002030500130100.htm  [quote] The differences between a half-ass skeleton and that of a horse are so small that one needs a trained specialist plus the lucky find of the lower forelegs of a horse/onager to determine which is which, for "bones of a larger khur will overlap in size with those of a small horse, and bones of  a small khur will overlap in size with those of a donkey." [unquote] Was it an aryan donkey or an aryan khur or was it a dravidian horse or munda sadam, equus caballus? A trial will, hopefully, untangle the muddle scholars have landed themselves in using creationist foundations to identify the aryan equus (assuming that Aryan equus is relatable to another hoax which had devastating consequences in Europe leading to the Second World War, called the Nazi Aryan).

Onagers drawing a chariot on the Standard of Ur.

Asiatic wild-ass, khur in Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, Bharatam http://www.shunya.net/Pictures/WesternIndia/Gujarat/LittleRannKutch/AsiaticWildAss12.jpg Trita performs the first As'vamedha yajna involving the as'va of Yama with 17 pairs of ribs. Rigveda notes that such a horse with 17 ribs was first harnessed by Trita and first mounted by Indra. (Rigveda 1.162.18). See notes in Annex 2 on horses with 17 pairs of ribs.

 

We have to understand how philology works and its motivations. IEL, in particular, is firmly motivated by Biblical creationism, Japheth and the fraud called William Jones now shown wearing a skull-cap on a marble panel in Oxford College Chapel. William Jones wearing a skull-cap, enshrined on a chapel wall, shows Jones to be a missionary, though he had earlier been lauded  as a Sanskrit-lover, as the Father of Indo-European Linguistics attesting to the supremacy of Europeans and their burden to civilize many colonies including the Indian colony. Hindus were shown on the marble panel cowering at the feet of William Jones.  See photo at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/kalyan97/detail?.dir=57ce&.dnm=e3ad.jpg

Thanks to Rajiv Malhotra for obtaining this photograph (after two years of diligent pursuit) and thanks to Arindam Chakrabarti who had written as follows: [quote] There is a monument to Sir William Jones, the great eighteenth-century British Orientalist, in the chapel of University College, Oxford. This marble frieze shows Sir William sitting on a chair writing something down on a desk while three Indian traditional scholars squatting in front of him are either interpreting a text or contemplating or reflecting on some problem.  It is well known that for years Jones sat at the feet of learned pandits in India to take lessons in Sanskrit grammar, poetics, logic, jurisprudence, and metaphysics. He wrote letters home about how fascinating and yet how complex and demanding was his new learning of these old materials. But this sculpture shows – quite realistically – the Brahmins sitting down below on the floor, slightly crouching and bare-bodied – with no writing implements in their hands (for they knew by heart most of what they were teaching and did not need notes or printed texts!) while the overdressed Jones sits imperiously on a chair writing something at a table. The inscription below hails Jones as the "Justinian of India" because he "formed" a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws. The truth is that he translated and interpreted into English a tiny tip of the massive iceberg of ancient Indian Dharmashastra literature along with some Islamic law books. Yet the monument says and shows Jones to be the "law-giver," and the "native informer" to be the "receiver of knowledge." What this amply illustrates is that the semiotics of colonial encounters have – perhaps indelibly – inscribed a profound asymmetry of epistemic prestige upon any future East-West exchange of knowledge. [unquote](Arindam Chakrabarti, "Introduction," Philosophy East & West Volume 51, Number 4 October 2001 449-451.)  loc. cit. Rajiv Malhotra's article at https://thecandideye.wordpress.com/2009/07/21/geopolitics-and-sanskrit-phobia/

 

William Jones concludes that Indians were co-descendants of Ham, son of Noah

 

William Jones (1746-1794) was an employee of the East India Company and is the acknowledged founder of Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) related to a `family' of languages which stretched from Iceland to northern India.  He started the hypothesis of a common descent of languages. August Schleicher elaborated on this hypothesis of Jones. Robert Pennock, in his book "Tower of Babel, the evidence against the new Creationism" comments on the lack of direct observation and questions the assumed status of (linguistic) evolution as factual and also as theoretical.  See The Linguistic Creation of Man: Charles Darwin, August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and the Missing Link in Nineteenth-Century Evolutionary Theory by Robert J. Richards, The University of Chicago. http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/articles/Schleicher--final.doc

Johann Gottfried Herder and others located a group separate from Sanskrit called the languages of Shem, the Semitic languages (consistent with sons of Noah departing in different directions across the globe), distinct from Japhetic or Indo-European languages.

It will be appropriate to cite from the India-forum article by A. Ananth Kumar cited in the annex. "Edwin Bryant (Quest of the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, 2000) writes that near the end of the 18th century, philologer Sir William Jones concluded his researches by claiming to have "traced the foundation of the Indian empire above three thousand eight hundred years from now" (145), that is to say, safely within the confines of Bishop Usher's creation date of 4004 B.C.E. and, more important, within the parameters of the Great Flood, which Jones considered to have occurred in 2350 B.C.E. Such undertakings afford us a glimpse of some of the tensions that many European scholars were facing in their encounter with India at the end of the eighteenth century; the influence of the times clearly weighed heavily. However, Jones's compromise with the biblical narrative did make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans: "Jones in effect showed that Sanskrit literature was not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of the Bible's version of history" (Trautmann, 1997, 74). Jones's chronological researches did manage to calm the waters somewhat and "effectively guaranteed that the new admiration for Hinduism would reinforce Christianity and would not work for its overthrow" (74). At the same time, numerous 18th century indologists were of the opinion that India was the origin of civilisation."

 

Jones' thesis was founded on Biblical conceptions of history of languages and nations

 

This conception of history and related chronology is effectively articulated by Trautman: "18th-century European ideas about the origin of language and its development are contained within the short, Biblican chronology of the world, which among English speakers was thought to have begun with the creation in 4004 BC or rather with the more recent Confusion of Tongues at the Tower of Babel which occurred in about 2300 BC (discussed in Trautmann, Thomas R., 1992, `The revolution in ethnological time: the Marrett memorial Lecture 1991', Man n.s. 27.379-397). They are further configured by the Genesis narrative of the descent of Noah, into what the anthropologists call a segmentary lineage of nations, which is the substratum of the segmentary lineage of languages. To hold to the project of uncovering relations among nations through the comparison of vocabulary lists is to hold that languages have similarities among themselves in proportion to the closeness of their derivation. It is this conception and the project which flows from it that Europeans took around the world in the 17th and 18th centuries...It is this project that Europe brings to the world it turns into its colonies; but it is a project formed ages earlier and formed around, not the Greek but rather the Biblical conceptions of the history of languages and nations…Jones argued that straight lines leading from a central homeland to the early Hamite civilizations would not cross if the center were placed in Iran – the near neighborhood, that is, of the Plain of Shinar where the Tower was built…It did not trouble Jones, for example, to conclude that the ancient Indians, Romans and Greeks were co-descendants of Ham, son of Noah (see Trautmann, Thomas R., 1997, Aryans and British India, Berkeley and Los Angeles, Univ. of Calif. Press, Indian ed., New Delhi, Vistaar Publications/Sage,: 42-52)." [Trautmann, Thomas R., 2002, Discovering Aryan and Dravidian in British India, a tale of two cities. http://www.benjamins.com/jbp/series/HL/31-1/art/0003a.pdf ]

 

Bases of Biblical Creationism and Tower of Babel

Let us take note of some revelations from the Bible, a document which was the frame of reference for Creationists like William Jones and August Schleicher.

(Genesis 1:28; 9:1) Shinar (Babylon) was the place where humanity congregated to build a great tower reaching to the heaven, disobeying Jehovah's command to fill the earth.

Godhead did not approve of the project and declared "Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." The sacred decree held sway, human languages were born, and men scattered upon the face of the earth.

Full text follows:

(Genesis 11: 1-9) And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Josephus, the Jewish historian was emphatic: "When all men were of one language, some of them built a tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon." (Antiquities 1.4.3)

William Jones referred to `the primitive language from which all others were derived, or to which at least they were subsequent." (`The ninth anniversary discourse: on the origin and families of nations", The Works of Sir William Jones, ed. Anna Maria Jones, 13 vols., London, 1807; reprint in Collected Works, ed. Garland Cannon, Richmond, Surrey and New York, 1993, 3: 199).

 

Sir William Jones said about Krishna: "In the Sanscrit dictionary, compiled more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole history of the incarnate deity, born of a virgin, and miraculously escaping in infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country" (Asiatic Researches, Vol. I, p. 273).

The journey of IEL from Biblical Japhetic to racial Aryans to linguistic Aryans and to the post-world war II term called `indo-european' is traced by  A. Ananth Kumar. Excerpts from his article (AIT-more than meets the eye) are annexed.

The theological dictionary  provides an authoritative account of Japheth: [quote] In the Bible, Japheth is ascribed seven sons: Gomer, Magog, Tiras, Javan, Meshech, Tubal, and Madai. According to Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews I.6): "Japheth, the son of Noah, had seven sons: they inhabited so, that, beginning at the mountains Taurus and Amanus, they proceeded along Asia, as far as the river Tanais (Don), and along Europe to Cadiz; and settling themselves on the lands which they light upon, which none had inhabited before, they called the nations by their own names." Josephus subsequently detailed the nations supposed to have descended from the seven sons of Japheth. Among the nations various later writers have attempted to assign to them are as follows:

 

    * Javan: Greeks (Ionians)
    * Magog: Scythians, Slavs, Irish, Hungarians
    * Madai: Mitanni, Mannai, Medes, Persians, Indo-Aryans, Kurds
    * Tubal: Tabali, Georgians, Italics, Illyrians, Iberians, Basques
    * Tiras: Thracians, Goths, Jutes, Teutons
    * Meshech: Phrygians, Caucasus Iberians, Algonquians
    * Gomer: Scythians, Turks, Armenians, Welsh, Picts, Irish, Germans. 

In the same vein, Georgian nationalist histories associate Japheth's sons with certain ancient tribes, called Tubals (Tabals, Tibarenoi in Greek) and Meshechs (Meshekhs/Mosokhs, Moschoi in Greek), who they claim represent non-Indo-European and non-Semitic, possibly "Proto-Iberian" tribes of Asia Minor of the 3rd-1st millennias BC.  [unquote]

http://larrycorrell.brinkster.net/theologicaldictionary/references.asp?theword=Japheth

 

The non-falsifiable Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) is born from application of the term 'japhetic' consistent with Biblical creationism. How reliable can a discipline based on creationism be?

 

[quote] For those Jews, Muslims, and Christians who take the genealogies of Genesis to be historically accurate, Japheth is commonly believed to be the father of the Europeans. The link between Japheth and the Europeans stems from Genesis 10:5, which states that the sons of Japheth moved to the "isles of the Gentiles," commonly believed to be the Greek isles although some theories suggest the British Isles . According to that book, Japheth and his two brothers formed the three major races:

• Japheth is the father of the Japhetic race
• Ham is the father of the Hamitic race
• Shem is the father of the Semitic race

The term "Japhetic" was also applied by William Jones and other early linguists to what later became known as the Indo-European language group. In a different sense, it was also used by the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr in his Japhetic theory. [unquote] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japheth

This is a theory which derived all Caucasian languages from the four mystic syllables: yon, ber, sal and ros.

 

Colonial dialectics of inclusion and exclusion; and transmutation of polyglot agonies of Babel into a cult of transcendent European erudition

 

A remarkable link between linguists' work and Christian proselytizing is underscored by Joseph Errington of Yale University (Joseph Errington, 2001, Colonial Linguistics, Ann. Rev. Anthropol., 30: 19-39). Errington argues that, colonialism while enabling  the work of colonial linguistics in areas such as Africa, Malay, Philippines and India was also used to legitimize colonialism.

 

[quote]…assumptions about the status of linguistics as a science elide enduring, widespread links between the work of linguistic description and Christian proselytizing, nowhere more evident than in Pike's own comments on his object of study, phonemics, as "a control system blessed of God to preserve tribes from Chaos." (quoted in Hvalkof S, Aaby P., 1981, Is God an American? An Anthropological Perspective on the Missionary Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.  Copenhagen: Int. Work Group Indig. Aff., p. 37). As a leading figure of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the single largest organization of linguists and missionaries working in the world today, he can be considered a postcolonial American successor to colonial-era missionizing linguists. This continuity between colonial past and postcolonial present is very clear in missionary linguistic work now ongoing in marginal communities all over the world, with collateral goals and effects both obvious and intimate (Schieffelin B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy: a chronology of influences. See Kroskrity 2000, pp. 293–328). Late colonial era missionaries left another sort of mark on contemporary linguistic scholarship if, as Gaeffke (Gaeffke P. 1990. A rock in the tides of time: Oriental studies then and now. Acad. Quest. Spring:67–74)  asserts, disproportionate numbers of their offspring are now scholars of Oriental languages. (Noting how interested constructions of linguistic history are pirated by colonial subjects, Errington cites the instance of colonial studies of Tamil)… Newly understood as first among members of the newly named Dravidian language family, Tamil became a symbolic resource in struggles for cultural autonomy that crosscut ethnic, caste, and religious lines of difference. Segments of a colonialized society appropriated colonizers' versions of linguistic descent and mobilized them in politically fraught struggles over legitimate genres of liturgical speech (Appadurai A. 1981. Worship and Conflict UnderColonial Rule: A South Indian Case. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press; Schiffman HF. 1996. Linguistic Culture andLanguage Policy. New York: Routledge)… Inscribed in Jones' Third Discourse on the Hindus can be seen two "modalities of colonial knowledge" (Cohn BS. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press ). In an investigative modality he wrote as a judge who needed access to versions of native legal texts less "degenerate" than those initially available to him. This animated scholarship in the tradition of classical philology, aimed at recovering "pure," originary forms of texts. Though this project may have resonated with Hindu Puranic senses of a normative textual past (Rocher R. 1993. British Orientalism in the eighteenth century: the dialectics of knowledge and government. See Breckenridge CA, van der Veer P, eds. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: Univ. Penn. Press, pp. 215–45), it primarily served and legitimized British rule. However, the transposition of comparative strategies  from the structure of texts to language systems took Jones' work into a historiographic modality. It demonstrated what Cohn calls the "ontological power" of "assumptions about how real social and natural worlds are constituted" (1996, p. 4). Jones accomplished this by transposing the strategies of classical philological scholarship from the domain of authored (and mistransmitted) texts to the domain of authorless linguistic structure. In this way, the comparative method opened up prehistory to empirical, inductive reasoning.  The ideological and political salience of this shift, and the enormous intellectual prestige it lent to the discipline of comparative philology that arose from it, can be characterized by adapting Chatterjee's observations (Chatterjee P. 1986. Nationalist Thought andthe ColonialWorld: A Derivative Discourse?London: Zed Books UN Univ.) on relativism and reason in (post)colonial encounters. Comparative philology brought into convergence the exercise of distinctively European reason and distinctively European power, allowing intellectual relations between European rationality and its (linguistic) object to be conflated with political relations between colonializing and colonialized peoples. This made philology central for scholarly  figurings of colonial "dialectics of inclusion and exclusion" (Cooper F, Stoler AL. 1997a. Between metropole and colony. See Cooper & Stoler 1997b, pp. 1–56; Cooper F, Stoler AL, eds. 1997b. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press), because it eided the gap between scientific study of abstract language structures and political control of human conduct. In this way the science of language (difference) simultaneously served to "transmute . . . polyglot agonies of Babel into a cult of transcendent European erudition" (Herzfeld M. 1987. Anthropology Through theLooking-Glass: Critical Ethnography in theMargins of Europe. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniv. Press, p. 31)… (In a postcolonial postscript, Errington notes:) Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1966), cited by   many as the founding document of modern linguistic science, contains the observation that "there is no other field in which so many absurd notions, prejudices, mirages, and fictions have sprung up" (1966, p. 7). [unquote]

 

William Jones and his belief system based on migrations of Japhet

 

In this context of colonial linguistics reinforcing or legitimizing colonialism, it is possible to see why William Jones got it all wrong, founded as he was in the IEL belief system related to Tower of Babel.

'Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong, or Jones' role in how to establish language families' by Lyle Campbell, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Some excerpts:

    [quote] Jones' interpretation of affinity among Asian peoples and their languages reflects not so much the linguistic facts as the biblical framework with Mosaic chronology in which Jones couched his thinking; this interpretation, based on the descendants of Noah, naturally involved a genealogical orientation, and this both reflected and imposed views of how languages could be related to one another – this was Orientalism directed in defense of Christianity (Trautman, Thomas R., 1998,  The lives of Sir William Jones. Sir Willkiam Jones, 1746-1794:  a commemoration, ed. by Alexander Murray, Oxford:  Oxford University Press on behalf of University College, Oxford, pp. 107, 109)." 

"His Ninth Discourse is quite different from the previous ones; it is almost wholly an attempt to accommodate Jones' conclusions about the nations of Asia within a biblical framework, one influenced heavily by the writings of his friend, Jacob Bryant (1774-1776), to whom Jones made occasional reference throughout his discourses and whom Jones praised highly in the beginning of the Third, where Jones began his treatises on the five principal Asian nations.  Here Jones seems to abandon the better part of the comparative linguistics of the day in favor of a very long-standing biblical account, speculating about descent from the sons of Noah and about Mosaic chronology:

Three sons of the just and virtuous man, whose lineage was preserved from the general inundation, travelled, we are told, as they began to multiply, in three large divisions variously subdivided:  the children of Ya'fet [Japhet] seem, from the traces of Sclavonian names, and the mention of their being enlarged, to have spread themselves far and wide, and to have produced the race, which, for want of a correct appellation, we call Tartarian:  the colonies, formed by the sons of Ham and Shem, appear to have been nearly simultaneous; and, among those of the latter branch, we find so so [sic] many names incontestably preserved at this hour in Arabia, that we cannot hesitate in pronouncing them the same people whom hitherto we have denominated Arabs; while the former branch, the most powerful and adventurous of whom were the progeny of Cush, Misr, and Rama (names remaining unchanged in Sanscrit, and highly revered by the Hindus,) were, in all probability, the race which I call Indian.  (Jones 1979 [1792], The ninth anniversary discourse, delivered 23rd February 1792:  on the origin and families of nations.  Asiatick Researches 3, pp. 418-35. New Delhi:  Cosmo Publications, 485-6).

            From testimonies adduced in the six last annual discourses  …  it seems to follow that, the only human family after the flood established themselves in the northern parts of Iran; as they multiplied, they were divided into three distinct branches, each retaining little at first, and losing the whole by degrees, of their common primary language  …; that the branch of YA'FET was enlarged in many scattered shoots over the north of Europe and Asia  …  and had no use of letters, but formed a variety of dialects [languages], as their tribes were variously ramified; that, secondly, the children of HAM, Who founded in Iran itself the monarchy of the first Chaldeans, invented letters  … they were dispersed at various intervals, and in various colonies, over land and ocean; that the tribes of MISR, CUSH, and RAMA, settled in Africk and India; while some of them, having inproved the art of sailing, passed from Egypt, Phenice, and Phrygia, into Italy and Greece  …  whilst a swarm from the same hive moved by a northerly course into Scandinavia, and another, by the head of Oxus, and through the passes  … as far as the territories of Chin and  Tancut  … nor is it unreasonable to believe that some of them found their way from the eastern isles into Mexico and Peru, where traces were discovered of rude literature and mythology analogous to those of Egypt and India; that thirdly, the old Chaldean empire being overthrown by the Assyrians  … other migrations took place  …  while the rest of Shem's progeny, some of whom before had settled on the Red Sea, peopled the whole Arabian peninsula.  (Jones 1979 [1792], The ninth anniversary discourse, delivered 23rd February 1792:  on the origin and families of nations.  Asiatick Researches 3, 418-35. New Delhi, Cosmo Publications, pp. 490-1.

In the Tenth Discourse, this is reaffirmed: 

            we cannot surely deem it an inconsiderable advantage that all our historicalr esearches have confirmed the Mosaic accounts of the primitive world  … Three families migrate in different courses from one region, and, in about four centuries, establish very distant governments and various modes of society:  Egyptians, Indians, Goths, Phenicians, Celts, Greeks, Latians, Chinese, Peruvians, Mexicans, all sprung from the same immediate stem.  (Jones 1979f[1793], The tenth anniversary discourse, delivered 28 February 1793, On Asiatic history, civil and natural,  Asiatick Researches 4,  New Delhi,  Cosmo Publications, xv). It must be asked how such a mistaken classification, forced to conform to preconceived biblical interpretations, could have been so misunderstood by generations of scholars as the foundation of comparative linguistics, how it could have had such a monumental impact in the linguistic literature? "

"One citation in the long tradition before Jones leading up to the recognition of the Indo-European family is well worth citing, for it shows how unoriginal the philologer passage was.  Jone's celebrated quotation is remarkably similar to Andreas Jäger's statement of 1686, of a hundred years earlier:

            An ancient language, once spoken in the distant past in the area of the Caucasus mountains and spreading by waves of migration throughout Europe and Asia, had itself ceased to be spoken and had left no linguistic monuments behind, but had as a "mother" generated a host of "daughter languages," many of which in turn had become "mothers" to further "daughters."  (For a language tends to develop dialects, and these dialects in the course of time become independent, mutually unintelligible languages.)  Descendants of the ancestral languages include Persian, Greek, Italic (whence Latin and in time the modern Romance tongues), the Slavonic Metcalf, George J., 1974, The Indo-European hypothesis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in: Studies in the history of linguistics:  traditions and paradigms, ed. by Dell Hymes,  Bloomington, Indiana University Press, p. 233) [i] 

[i] Note also that Jäger included Slavic, which Jones thought was connected with non-Indo-European Central Asian languages, and unlike Jones, for whom Celtic and "Gothic" (Germanic) were "mixed" with non-Indo-European languages, Jäger accurately classified them as members of the same family without the assumed admixture. [unquote]  Source: http://www.linguistics.utah.edu/Faculty/campbell/Campbell_Jones_for_Trask.doc 

 

Myth-making Jakob Grimm, is a writer of German purana, romanticism which owed much to the Bible's tale of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Eden

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The motivation of the Grimm brothers in their literary contributions was to create a German national identity. 

At the end of World War II, allied commanders banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany in the belief that they had contributed to Nazi savagery.  

http://www.suite101.com/external_link.cfm?elink=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jgrimm.htm 

 

In Jacob Grimm's DEUTSCHE MYTHOLOGIE fairy tales are traced in the pre-Christian era, in ancient faith and superstitions of the Germanic peoples. The archaic pre-medieval Germany was seen representing a Golden Age, a period of comparative harmony and happiness before it was lost. This romantic view of the history owed much to Bible's tale of Eden or perhaps also Arthurian legends.  

http://www.nalanda.nitc.ac.in/resources/english/etext-project/grimm/grimm.html  

 

All students agree with Jacob Grimm [1785 - 1863], who, in his "Deutsch Mythologie," says: "Simple folk have a craving for myths." It is this craving which I call Mirophily, and when Mirophily states that a code of laws has been miraculously communicated, we have a religion. http://www.christianism.com/appendixes/VIII.html 

In Grimms' Fairy Tales, James McGlathery offers a sound frame for examining scholarship on the tales and specifically on Snow White.  "Scholarly interest in fairy tales, however, arose precisely because of perceived ties between those stories and myth and legend. Beginning with Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm themselves, fairy tales began to be studied as descending from ancient sources, and therefore as providing information about the past of nations and peoples and as preserving remnants of cultural treasures otherwise lost or unrecorded. As a consequence, study of fairy tale in the Grimms' time and on to the end of the nineteenth century was almost wholly devoted either to attempts at determining the place and time of the genre's origin or at discovering in the tales survivals of ancient ritualistic practices." 

http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/swcontext.html  

In the very early 19th century, the time in which the Brothers Grimm lived, the Holy Roman Empire had just met its fate, and Germany as we know it today did not yet exist; it was basically an area of hundreds of principalities and small or mid-sized countries. The major unifying factor for the German people of the time was a common language. There was no significant German literary history. So part of what motivated the Brothers in their writings and in their lives was the desire to help create a German identity. 

http://www.answers.com/topic/the-brothers-grimm  

 

Eventually, in 1812, in the preface to their collection of folktales, (the two Grimm brothers) declared, "Perhaps it was just the right time to record these tales, as those who should have been preserving them are becoming rarer," and "All of these tales contain the essence of German myth, which was deemed forever lost." 

 

http://www.magazine-deutschland.de/issue/Grimm_6-05_ENG_E1.php  

 

Eurocentric mindset

 

In response to an article on Altaic origins of Andronovo, Lamberg-Karlovsky replied pointing out a Eurocentric mindset:

"Rona-Tas appears to avoid the Indo-Iranians entirely and suggest that both Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolian could "reflect a culture like the Andronovo." Such diversity among the Andronovo appeals to me. Framing the question as what language the Andronovo spoke, is, I believe, misdirected. The Andronovo was made up of many cultures subject to contant change; some may have spoken Indo-Iranian, others Proto-Turkic, and yet others Proto-Mongolian, and pace Mallory, there may have been an occasinoal Finno-Ugric speaker among the lot." p. 84

"It is interesting that the archaeological (and linguistic) literature has focused entirely upon the Indo-Iranians, overlooking the other major linguistic families believed to have been inhabiting the same regions -- the Altaic, the Ugric, and the Dravidian...The fact that these language families are of far less interest to the archaeologist may have a great deal to do with the fact that it is primarly speakers of Indo-European in search of their own roots who have addressed the problem." p. 75 

"The cultures reflected by the lexical stocks of the Turkic and Mongolian protolanguages had highly developed animal husbandry with horses, limited knowledge of agriculture, and almost no signs of sedentarism. Turkic and Mongolisan could be connected with the Bactrian Margiana complex only if we were to suppose that after the dissolution of that complex they lost the lexical groups that must have present in it. This is unlikely. Both Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolian, could, however reflect a culture like the Andronovo." p. 82 [Source: Andras Rona-Tas in the Feb. 2002 edition of _Current Anthropology_(vol. 43) ]

 

 

Extremely limited evidence from IEL for historical/cultural studies

 

Mayuresh Kelkar noted: [quote] "Philologist and their subset Indo-European linguists look for similarities in language, culture, artifacts etc to trace their ultimate origins. Out of the hundreds of so called "Indo-European" languages ONLY FOUR words can reliably be reconstructed (Melchert 2001). They are horse, yoke, bovine, and most crucially wool (wheel is conspicuously absent from this list). Two of them bovine and yoke are clearly irrelevant. Horse can be eliminated because: 1. There are five different roots for this word in "Indo-European" langauges. So it is not necessary that the PIE speakers (with the usual caveat assuming they ever existed) even knew about the horse or had anything do with its domestication. 2. When it comes to "Indo-Aryan" speakers, horse is not native to their present location in South Asia. But then the supposedly native inhabitants of that land have there own word for horse. Moreover, horse remains have been found in the region. 3. All archaeological evidence indicates that the initial domesticators of this beast were Uralo-Altaic speaking. That only leave ONE word and that is wool. Sheep did not become wooly till much later than the Neolithic period. This could perhaps put a firm date on PIE dispersal. But the sheep were hairy before they become wooly and thus the proto Indo Hittite word *hwln could have meant fleece which later on came to mean wool. Why debate about horses and wheels when these items cannnot even be linked with the supposed IE expansions? [unquote] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/IndiaArchaeology/message/4351

 

 

Indological distortions in Bharatiya Language History

 

A case study is presented based on an incisive article by Lisa Mitchell (Mitchell, Lisa, 2006, Making the local foreign: shared language and history in southern India, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 16, Issue 2, pp. 229-248) in the following sections: 

 

·        Categories of Language based on mutual intelligibility  

·        Mischievous introduction of language as a category to categorise people, apart from categories of gender, race, class 

·        Semantics, the key determinant for language differentiation 

·        Injection of a new a category -- anyades'yam – a category not recognized in tradition 

·        Colonial leap from intelligibility to origins introduces the poison of ethnicity 

Categories of Language based on mutual intelligibility  

 

A recent (December 2006) article looks at southern Indian categories of language analysis based on Telugu textual sources. Lisa Mitchell notes how British colonial understanding of language introduced a new notion of the `foreign' in these categories and showed an exclusive interest in the historical origins of words. This slant had the consequence of replacing the criterion of mutual intelligibility by the criterion of history and common origin as the determinants of what constitutes a language shared by a group of people. 

 

This slant is most evident in Tamilnadu where the history and common origin was to define and isolate Tamil as a unique creation, independent of shared intelligibility of words from neighbouring people or people with whom people of Tamilnadu had contacts. It is not uncommon to see a passion for Tamil as the primordial language which ante-dates every other known language creating a tendency to muddle a historical consciousness with a uniquely perceived language identity. 

 

A shared language, Mitchell notes, is no longer defined as a mutually intelligible idiom but a language defined in terms of historical origins.

Acharya Hemachandra who wrote on the grammars of Samskrtam and Prakrtam also compiled four lexicons: 1 Abhidhanachintamani a lexicon in the same style as the Amarakosa: 2. Anekarthasangraha, a dictionary of homonyms: 3. Nighantu, a dictionary of medicinal plants: 4. and Des'inamamala, and dictionary of (native) words not derivable by the rules of Sanskrit of Prakrit grammars. The use of the word des'i is emphatically related to the identification of words 'not derivable by the rules of grammars.'

Bharatiya tradition of study of languages has been based on a shared identity, a shared appreciation of mutual intelligibility of lexemes and units of thought, as exemplified by the continuum of bharatiya traditions from the vedic through bauddha, jaina and many other pantha-s and shared technologies related to metallurgy, health studies (ayurveda), pharmacognosy (nighantu of herbals and formulations), yoga, s'ilpa, aagama and puja vidhaana and general world-view of aatman, dharma, vrata, yajna. 

 

The tradition of language studies and language analyses, dates back to the days of Rgveda samhita.  

 

Mischievous introduction of language as a category to categorise people, apart from categories of gender, race, class 

 

Comparative histocial linguistics is NOT to be viewed as a universal method of knowledge production because these disciplines (and sub-disciplines of language studies) are based in ideology and belief-systems and are not falsifiable. 

History is only one method of classifying language use even when historical analyses are sought to be used to used to buttress colonial regimes or Biblical belief systems. I am grateful to Lisa Mitchell for putting together works which provide alternative linguistic ideologies. (Silverstein 1979; Kroskrity, Shcieffelin, and Wooland, 1992; Woolard and Schieffelin 1994; Narayana Rao 1995; Pollock 1995; Aklujkar 1996; Freeman 1998a, 1998b; Ramaswamy 1998; Kroskrity 2000). This is contrasted by Mitchell with the workis based on analyses of colonial constructions of knowledge (Cohn 1985; Gal and Irvine 1995; Irvine and Gal 2000; Mantena, Mitchell and Bate 2005). 

 

Semantics, the key determinant for language differentiation 

 

Semantics account for mutual intelligibility of languages and dialects among peoples. Mutual intelligibility of thousands of lexemes has been proved in the Indian Lexicon (with over 8000 semantic clusters) spanning over 25 ancient languages of Bharatam. The intelligibility is defined only in terms of the cognate `meaning' – `artha' or `porul' – of a given sememe and its phonetic variants in a dialectical continuum, treating the entire cultural domain of Bharatam as a linguistic area from the days of Sarasvati civilization, that is, from circa 6500 BCE. 

 

Mitchell notes the tradition of Telugu language studies how language was differentiated: "…rather than being understood in relation to foreignness or identity (one's own or another's), prior to the 19th century language use was formally differentiated in terms that could be measured along a spectrum of intelligibility. At one end of this spectrum, precolonial linguistic analyses of language (Sanskrit as well as regional literary languages like Telugu) describe those features of language that were capable of traveling farthest over time and space (though, significantly, not class) while still maintaing intelligibility, and which therefore were also identified with the greatest levels of prestige, education, and refinement. At the other end of the spectrum, increasingly local language use was intelligible within progressively more geographically narrow domains. Moving toward this end of the spectrum meant that language was comprehensible only within a restricted territory, region, set of villages, or social group…Although such a spectrum of language usage in relationship to intelligibility still exists in practice in southern India, these distinctions are no longer of primary importance, and, indeed…the formal vocabulary for describing such differences has largely been lost, replaced by terms – in some cases the same terms – that take their meanings from a system defined almost exclusively in relation to historical origins. This earlier formal linguistic ideology made possible the recognition of particular categories of language as appropriate for particular USES rather than for particular USERS, especially among literate elites who routinely commanded multiple scripts and language styles…The new categories of grammatical analysis formulated in the 19th century had wide-ranging implications for the ways in which both literate and nonliterate individuals and groups began to think about everyday linguistic practices, features of group difference, and the categories through which these are experienced." 

 

This perceptive comment of replacing the criterion of mutual intelligibility by the criterion of historical origin is also relatable to the linguistic reorganization of states in the nation of Bharatam after attaining swarajyam from the British colonial rule.  

The colonial approach to language studies has resulted in a warped view of language evolution shifting the focus away from mutual intelligibility among language-speakers of the nation. Concepts such as the Tamil Nation or Telugu Des'am are rooted in this warped view of language. The colonial construct of language led to political and social movements based on fissiparous, isolationist tendencies. Many political formations used language as a category of social mobilization, together with the abuse of jaati as categories relatable to an alien concept called casta (Portuguese). Thus, language which was an instrument for intelligibility among peoples of a nation, has been used as a political tool creating false sub-group identities. 

Mutual intelligibility as a criterion used in early language studies starting from Hemacandra's Des'inaamamaala,  led to the use of language analyses terms such as tatsama, tadbhava, des'ya. Boddupalli Purushottam underscored that Hemacandra defines des'i as `such words that are not derived by grammar and even derived, are not current in Sanskrit dictionaries…Such words are further defined…as not including provincial dialects, but only such Prakrit words as are current through ages, without beginning' (1996: 103). Thus des'ya mean a lexeme of unknown origins and timeless and which lacks grammatical derivation. Colonial reconstructions of language studies disregarded this definition and introduced the concept of historical origins of a lexeme. For example,  as Mitchell notes: "…British scholars of Telugu struggled for nearly half a century to make local classifications correspond with their own notions of language. In attempting to force commensurability, British scholars of southern Indian languages frequently adjusted categories to suit their own understandings…Ultimately they inserted a new notionh of the `foreign' into a system that, although itself not static over the preceding centries, had never before contained such a category." (Mitchell, 2006: 203). 

 

This concept of `foreign' word, ended up in creating a devastating concept of language as a distinctive sub-national identity, thus breaking up the essential unity which was seen in traditional language categories of tatsama and tadbhava. 

Tatsama means a lexeme with an equivalent in Sanskrit. 

 

Tadbhava means a lexeme identifiable as altered but NOT NECESSARILY derived from Sanskrit. This is explained by Kahrs: "…the adoption of the term tadbhava in the sense of `derived from Sanskrit' was a feat of Western authors (1992: 245)." The word tadbhava should be used as it IS without imputing the concept of historical time as some Western authors have tended to imply. Tadbhava simply means `located in it, that is, in Sanskrit', a vaacas which was a mutually intelligible language for millennia. 

 

Des'ya means a lexeme with undecided etymology and which is NOT derived from grammar, from the sememes (dha_tupa_t.ha) of Panini's Sanskrit, hence, with no relationship to Sanskrit or aarya vaacas, but in vogue in a region or locality and hence, acceptable in literary usage as lexemes unique to a region. In some cases, as in Telugu, a sub-category was added, called graamya (dialect form used in a village or groups of villages) NOT used in literary compositions. Nannaya Bhatta's Andhra Sabda Cintamani (11th century) uses these four categories: tatsama, tadbhava, des'ya, graamya. Tatsama and tadbhava categories are also identified in Kittel's Kannada-English dictionary and many such dictionaries published during the colonial regime. Some authors as in Tamilnadu use categories such as cen-tamir.. (pure Tamil) in disregard for the work done by a team of scholars who published a multi-volume Tamil Lexicon of the Madras University with many lexemes clearly identifiable as tatsama or tadbhava (and noted as such in the Lexicon). Such a disregard can be attributed to a failure to appreciate the vedic foundations which run through the entire gamut of Sangam literature, as demonstrated by KV Sharma. (K. V. Sarma, 1983, "Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South India" in The Adyar Library Bulletin, 43:1; cf. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, 1987, "Sanskrit Elements in Early Tamil Literature," in Essays in Indian Art, Religion and Society, ed. Krishna Mohan Shrimali (New Delhi : Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.; Rangarajan, 1993, "Aryan Dravidian Racial Dispute from the Point of View of Sangam Literature," in The Aryan Problem, eds. S. B. Deo & Suryanath Kamath (Pune : Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti), p. 81-83). 

 

Kakunuri Appakavi refers to four kinds of Telugu bhaasha based on these categories – tatsama, tadbhava, des'ya, graamya bhaasha (1951: 38, verse 101). 

 

These categories of des'ya and graamya are in effect, the category of mleccha vaacas as distinct from aarya vaacas (refined, grammatically correct use of tatsama). Another differentiation was between Prakrit and Sanskrit (Natural form and Refined from): 1. pra_ + krt as distinct from 2. sams + krt, i.e. 1. naturally created and 2. grammatically perfected. 

Injection of a new `foreign' category -- anyades'yam – a category not recognized in tradition 

Campbell mischievously twists the traditional definition of des'yam as `language of the land' – a definition which is not based on any of the works of traditional grammarians and lexicographers. There is no warrant for such a twist in meaning. The texts in Telugu do NOT define des'yamu in these terms. Des'yamu is simply a reference to usage but of unascertained origin. 

 

Campbell's mischief is based on his classification system based on `origins of words'. 

 

Mitchell cites the example of Francis Whyte Ellis who established the first South Indian College for English civil servants and wrote a `Note to the Introduction' to Alexander Duncan Campbell's rewriting of Telugu Grammar in his book called `A Grammar of the the Teloogoo Language'. Though the work was attributed to `native grammarians' and `native authors' (Campbell 1820 (1816): xiv-xv), the note by Ellis used it as a proof of the Dravidian family of languages suggesting a familial kinship among Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, emphasizing their dissimilarity from Sanskrit and the languages of northern India.  

 

Campbell summarizes his discovery in the following terms: "It is certain that every Teloogoo Grammarian, from the days of Nunnia Bhutt to the present period, considers the two languages (Sanskrit and Telugu) as derived from sources entirely distinct; for each commences his work by classing the words of the language under four separate heads, which they distinguish by the respective names of des'yamu, language of the land, tatsamamu, Sanscrit derivatives, tadbhavamu, Sanscrit corruptions, and gramyamu, provincial terms." 

 

Thomas Trautmann (1999, 2001) notes that this is a significant observation in the history of comparative and historical linguistics and observes that the `discovery' of Ellis and Campbell of the Dravidian languages WAS MADE POSSIBLE "by the etymological analyses of roots used within the vyakarana tradition….Although Campbell lists the same four categories used by Indian authors, he has rearranged the order in which they have customarily been presented, beginning first with des'yam, rather than with tatsama and tadbhava. He also glosses des'yamu as `language of the land' rather than emphasizing its nonderivation from grammar, as Telugu scholars have done. His next words, however, are even more striking, for he states, `To these, later authors have added anyades'yamu, foreign words or those from other lands' [1820 (1816) xvii-xviii]. The way in which Campbell defines and frames anyades'yam is significant, for never before has it been listed as a subdivision of the des'yam category…Campbell later acknowledges this fact but in a way that dramatically masks the significance of the intervention he is making…By equating des'yam with `native' and opposing it to anyades'yam, Ellis is for the first time making these categories available for the kinds of regional ethnic identifications with language that many today accept as natural. The implications of this move – a sleight of hand almost invisible to today's sensibilities – for the ethnic politicization of language is tremendous. His reading further suggests that we must look carefully in order to understand the different ways in which language, identity and alterity were experienced and perceived prior to the arrival of the British." (Mitchell 2006: 234).  

Colonial leap from intelligibility to origins introduces the poison of ethnicity 

 

Taking a cue from the Colonial regime, and introducing `mother tongue' as an analytical category, many political movements have sought to identify languages with individuals (and groups) rather than with "particular uses, tasks, or contexts." The Bharatiya tradition as evidenced by many grammarians including Hemacandra and Tolkaappiyan, is NOT to equate known words with ethnic identities but categorize words in reference to the usefulness, in context and measured according to intelligibility over a region, beyond one's region of residence. 

 

In the bharatiya language tradition, language is a dialectical continuum in Bharatam governed by a common cultural framework provided by sanatana dharma – esha dhammo sanantano.  . 

 

"Colonial administrators sought to redefine languages in relation to the etymological origins or words and their historical changes over time, rather than in relation to the linguistic practices present in a particular place. For precolonial Indian grammarians of regional linguistic practices, some usages were recognized as more effective than others for particular purposes. All categories of language use – tatsama, tadbhava, des'ya and graamya – were seen as part of the language of the region. Where they differed was in the extent of their comprehensibility BEYOND the local. Although precoloinail grammarians used these descriptive categories in a prescriptive manner to accept some usages as appropriate in literary compositions, it was only colonial grammarians who began to define some local usage as Telugu and other usage as `not Telugu'." (Mitchell 2006: 241). 

 

This is an example of distortions engaged in by British authors of categories of lexemes which were only meant to be analysed in terms of their clarity, ease of understanding, intelligibility in terms of grammatical rules. The poison of ethnicity and `foreign-ness' was injected by the colonial view of the work of the `natives'. What Appakavi identified as words acquired by Telugu-speakers who have stayed in many regions (anyades'ajaandhram) (1951: 39, verse 108), words that belong to various dialects, becomes for Ellis `terms introduced into Telugu from foreign countries'. [1820 (1816): 16] 

Ellisd and Campbell equate des'yam lexemes with atsu or accha Telugu (pure Telugu) and call them `pure native terms' [1820 (1816): 21], a definition which has no basis, whatsoever, in the traditional analyses of language. This mischievous equation enables Campbell and Ellis to construct a notion of foreignness, a notion which does NOT occur anywhere in any text of bharatiya tradition. A concept of `purity' is also introduced by implying that presence of `foreign' words in a language somehow makes the language impure. This is a notion which is carried to absurd lengths in reference to Tamil passion by a recent upsurge in the demand for Dravida as a distinct, `native' identity in contrast to aarya vaacas as a `foreign' import. Scholars of Sanskrit have never viewed it as an isolated language but "as a register of refined language use that was highly manipulated and elaborated – the opposite pole on a continuum from prakrt, or natural, unmodified speech" (Mitchell 2006: 238; loc. cit. Aklujkar 1996: 74). This is consistent with the characterization of Sanskrit and Prakrit in Bharata's Natyas'aastra which refers to stage-recitation in two varieties, two registers of speech but within the same language (semantics, intelligibility) context: refined (samskrta) and natural (prakrta). Refinement was in reference to adherence to phonetic and grammatical rules in contract to natural speech which was `diverse and particular'. (Daud Ali 2004: 171). Many Prakrt were known in Bharata's time: for example, maagadhi, aavanti, s'auraseni – known by region or by one's social tation in life. The diverse and particular were NOT different ethnic identitites but only differences in degrees of refinement of speech with reference to grammar; these were differences based ONLY on levels of intelligibility, `clarity and expressiveness,' and NOT related to establishing origins of the words or lexemes used in speech. "This view enables us to see tatsama and tadbhava as categories indicating not the pure origins of words and their level of corruption, but, rather, their general familiarity over the widest possible territory." (Mitchell 2006: 239). This explains why Sanskrit was used in early inscriptions in a wide region spanning Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia consistent with the understanding that tatsama and tadbhava words were recognizable over a wide area along the expansive Indian Ocean Rim. In this perspective, des'ya or graamya words become intelligible only in narrower space or a region or a group of villages. 

 

Claims made by historical linguistics (whose claim to be a scientific method is questionable), like those of Marxist analysts and Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) assuming an Indo-European Language `family' have to be rejected in the context of this tradition because they have sought to use language as a category to divide and categorise people, together with differentiations based on gender, race and class. Disciplines such as IEL, governed by colonial comparative philology, belief in Biblical creationism and tower of babel, arrogate to themselves the unproven ability to narrate the deep history of the peoples, their interactions resulting in accentuating inequalities among peoples.  As Joseph Errington notes: "language difference (to) become a resource – like gender, race, and class – for figuring and naturalizing inequality" (2001: 20). 

 

 
Burrow's bewilderment about Bharatiya (Indian) languages

 

 

The japhetic beginnings may also explain the perplexed T. Burrow's bewilderment about Bharatiya (Indian) languages (Trans. 19, Bull. Ramakrishna Mission Inst. of Culture, Feb. 1958): "The number of loan-words in Sanskrit, which cannot be explained as either Dravidian or Munda, will remain considerable. It may very well turn out that the number of such words which cannot be so explained will outnumber those which can be. This is the impression one gets, for instance, from the field of plant-names, since so far only a minority of this section of the non-Aryan words has been explained from these two linguistic families. If we take, for instance, the name of the jujube (Zizyphus jujuba), we find four synonyms, all obviously non-Aryan words, namely kuvala or kola, karkandhu, badara and ghonta; and none of these has been explained out of either Dravidian or Munda. Evidence such as this leads to the conclusion that there must have been several non-Aryan languages or families of languages which exercised an influence on the vocabulary of Indo-Aryan".

In my view, Alinei who proposed the paleolithic continuity theory of languages may be on the right track, and is NOT on the margin of linguistics; those philologists and linguists who ridicule him are.

In the formative years of language studies, European philologists did benefit from the study of Sanskrit as noted by Kapil Kapoor, but unfortunately, the evolution of an Eurocentric approach and the wild-goose chase for Urheimat led to the non-falsifiable hoax of Indo-European Linguists. [quote] [T]hose who believe that this [Sanskrit] knowledge is now archaic would do well to recall that the contemporary western theories, though essentially interpretive, have evolved from Europe's 19th century interaction with Sanskrit philosophy, grammar and poetics; they would care to remember that Roman Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and de Saussure were Sanskritists, that Saussure was in fact a professor of Sanskrit at Geneva and that his published papers include work on Sanskrit poetics. The structural, formalist thinking and the linguistic turn of contemporary theory have their pedigree in Sanskrit thought. In this, Europe's highly fruitful interaction with the Indian thought over practically the same time-span contrasts sharply with 150 years of sterile Indian interaction with the western thought. After the founding of Sanskrit chairs in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Europe interacted with the Indian thought, particularly in philosophy, grammar, literary theory and literature, in a big way without abandoning its own powerful tradition. In the process, it created, as we have said a new discipline, Historical-Comparative Linguistics, produced a galaxy of thinkers - Schiller, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and above all Saussure - and founded a revolutionary conceptual framework which was to influence the European thought for the next century, Structuralism. (From "Eleven Objections to Sanskrit Literary Theory: A Rejoinde"r, [unquote] Kapil Kapoor, the expanded version of the lecture delivered at Dhvanyaloka on June 11, 2000. See the complete essay on-line at: http://www.indianscience.org/essays/st_es_kapoo_eleven.shtml)

Linguistic palaeontology: first word for cart wheel, kal, was a bharatiya invention.
ga_d.a_, ga_d.i_ (M.); ga_l.a cart (Si.); ga_d.alaum. (OG.); ga_llu~, ga_lli~ (G.)(CDIAL 4116). gad.wa~_t. cartwheel track, rut (CDIAL 4117). Image: wheel, cart: ka_l wheel, cart (Ta.); ga_li wheel (Ka.Tu.); kalu a carriage wheel (Te.); ga_nu, ga_lu wheel (Te.)(DEDR 1483).  <sili>(Z)  {N} ``^wheel''.  #30980. (Go.) <cikari>  {N} ``^wheel''.  @3425.  #5461. <gadi>(B)  {N} ``^wheel''.  Pl. <-le>.  *Des.   @B07810.  #10511. sal 'wedge joining the parts of a solid cart-wheel' (Santali) cakram 'wheel' (Niruktam)[Source: Indian Lexicon: http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati ] cf. kel (kelati) 'to shake, tremble, to go or move' (Dha_tup.xv.30)
Thus, in all bharatiya languages, the first word for cart-wheel is: kal (and dialectical variants since all languages of Bharatam are deemed a dialectical continuum when the wheel was invented). This can be called the first law of bhashya.
Surprise! "Gray, however, defends his dates, and points out a flaw in the wheel argument. What the daughter languages of proto-Indo-European inherited, he says, was not necessarily the word for wheel but the word "k'el," meaning "to rotate," from which each language may independently have derived its word for wheel. If so, the speakers of proto-Indo-European could have lived long before the invention of the wheel." http://www.meta-religion.com/Linguistics/Indo-American/biological_dig.htm  Biological dig for the roots of language. Russell Gray, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Linguistic palaeontology, therefore, conclusively proves that the first cart-wheel was invented in Bharatam among the speakers in the linguistic area comprising Tamil, Santali and Gujarati languages. So, ursprache (the original tongue of the Tower of Babel) in Indo-European homeland has to be found in Bharatam. Move over, Europe. For a technical discussion of time-depth in historical linguistics and linguistic palaeontology, by Colin Renfrew, see http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ISBN/1902937066//Location/DBBC
 

Studies based on the premise: language is a social contract

 

In a grand muddling of concepts of language with genetic connotations (using words like family) and of nation, IEL has only contributed to the evolution of Eurocentric world-view in utter disregard of scientific falsifiability and occam's razor criteria and continuing to be anchored on Biblical Creationism and on the Tower of Babel.

It is time to undo the damage caused to an understanding of interactions among peoples over time by delinking language studies of the IEL type from genetic jargon and to build a framework based on definition of language as a social contract for abhyudayam (welfare) and a means for exploring nihs'reyas (the unity of individual consciousness with cosmic consciousness). Abhyudayam and nihs'reyas are two facets of the impact of dharma, as an eternal social ethic, esha dhammo sanantano as Gautama the Buddha sees it. Such an approach will help focus on semantics as a core field of language studies to explain the evolution of human thought in response to social interactions and social contract.

 

Study of languages of Hindu civilization as an example of social contract

 

A beginning has been made to identify about 8000 semantic clusters for a variety of phenomena in a comparative dictionary of over 25 ancient languages of Bharatam. Indian lexicon (3157 pages) http://rapidshare.com/files/5736944/Indian_Lexicon.doc.html

The semantic clusters span the following categories :

Semantic clusters (1242 English words and Botanical species Latin) covering virtually all facets relatable to the history of human thought and knowledge systems.

·         Economic Court: Flora and Products from Flora

·         Birds

·         Insects

·         Fauna

·         Animate phenomena: birth, body, sensory perceptions and actions

·         Visual phenomena, forms and shapes

·         Numeration and Mensuration

·         Economic Court: Natural phenomena, Earth formations, Products of earth (excluding flora clustered in a distinct category)  

·         Building, Infrastructure

·         Work, skills, products of labor and workers (fire-worker, potter/ smith/ lapidary, weaver, farmer, soldier)

·         Language fields

·         Kinship, Social formations
  Other semantic clusters (including cognisance and lexemes which may indicate semantic expansion and may span many other semantic clusters; e.g. 'mix' cluster may relate to animate and inanimate clusters) Some examples are English meanings `adhere', `begin', `upper'.

 

A surprising result emerges. Over 4,000 so-called Dravidian etyma have cognates in Indo-Aryan and Munda languages pointing to a pattern of convergence among language-speakers in a region called Bharatam. (referred to as Bharatam Janam – the nation of the people of Bharata -- attested in an old document, Rgveda).

Bhartrhari notes that a sentence is the unit of meaning in Vaakyapadiya. Meanings of individual words are implied from a sentence. For example, a sentence can bea as simple as : Go. In Samskrtam it means cow or ray of light from cosmos. In English it means `move'. In such a formulation of language, language studies have to progress based on evidence, attested use of lexemes in context in a text, or epigraph or sculptural metaphor. Study of history of literature and culture, can thus become a necessary adjunct of study of history of language evolution.

There is remarkable evidence for two dialects of Magadhi, called S'uddhamagadhi and Ardhamagadhi related to Prakrit and Pali. A note is annexed in Annex 4 on some insights related to the richness of Pali to convey the aadhyatmika thoughts with particular reference to Gautama the Buddha's esha dhammo sanantano. (See Annex 4):

 

    *
      Notes on Pali language from The light of majjhimadesa
    *
      Pali language and literature (Pali Text Society)
    *
      Buddhism language and literature (Peter Friedlander)
    *
      The Pali language (Did the Buddha speak Pali?) 

 

There is NO evidence whatsoever about the languages spoken in Sarasvati civilization if we go only by archaeological artifacts. The only evidence is cultural continuity and hence, language continuum treating language as an integral expression of culture. For example, two terracotta toys depicting ladies were found at Nausharo, 300 kms. north of Karachi by Jean Paul Jarrige. These toys were painted, yes, painted. Hair was painted black; necklaces were painted golden and at the parting of the hair, the paint was red, indicating saffron, sindhur. I am sure that the people would have used specific terms to convey this unique bharatiya tradition of wearing sindhur at the parting of the hair. The only evidence we have is therefore to be taken only from the lexicons of Bharatiya languages, given the continuity of the tradition of wearing sindhur at the paapate, manga, parting of the hair. Yes, mleccha bhaasha is distinguishable from vedic or proto-vedic or Dravidian or munda/austro-asiatic. But, then, many lexemes of all these languages are traceable to mleccha. That Yudhishthira, Vidura and Khanaka spoke both Samskrtam and Mleccha is evidenced by the Mahabharata jaatugrha episode. That Hanuman was a pandita in Samskrtam (with the knowledge of 9 vyaakarana) and could also speak jaati bhaasha or maanusha bhasa is evidenced in the Ramayana. These point to the co-existence of both mleccha vaacas and aarya vaacas, both existing at the same time. That the same people spoke both languages is evidenced by the following evidences from ancient texts.

Bharata's Natyashastra (attributed to ca. 3rd century BCE) identifies languages in four categories: 1. atibha_s.a_ (superhuman language) 2. a_ryabha_s.a_ 3. ja_tibha_s.a_ and 4. yonyantari_bha_s.a_ (language of the animals)." ( 18.28-30) By using the term 'yonyantari_' in juxtaposition to 'ja_ti', Bharata is clearly delineating ja_ti as the category of language community, set of languages spoken by the people. This classification is also consistent with the  classification of Pan.ini who identifies chandas and bha_s.a_. Chandas is atibha_s.a; bha_s.a_ is composed of a_ryavaacas and mlecchavaacas as two versions of the Bharatiya language: vox literati (literary language) and vox populi (lingua franca). By the term, bha_s.a_, Pa_n.ini is referring to both Samskr.tam and Prakrits, that is the Bharatiya language community. The Hindu tradition holds that the expositions of Mahavira, for example, were also communicated to non-human beings (yonyantari_). Such a bha_s.a_ arose on the workers' or artisan's platforms, karmabhumi.

ja_tibha_s.a_ are composed of the language community of: Tamil, Munda (Austric), Prakrits, Pali, Mleccha, Nahali. Samskr.tam is a refined form of Prakrits. This is a community of Bharatiya languages because there was intense interaction among the various language speakers resulting in the formation of the Linguistic Area between ca. 6500 BCE in an extraordinary continuum to the present day. Present-day Bharatiya (including Himalayan) languages are differentiated versions derived from the Proto-vedic (or Indic). The basic premise of this work is that ja_tibha_s.a_ constitutes the substratum, the very foundation of all Bharatiya languages.

Mahes'varani Sutrani

 

Appendix 5 contains excerpts from Hindu Dharma: Vyakarana by Kanchi Acharya Chandrasekhara Sarasvati. It is titled: Bharatiya tradition: Linguistic Studies and Religion (HinduDharma: Vyakarana) Kanchi Acharya notes how Siva temples have a mandapa (pavilion or hall) called " vyakarana-danamandapa". S'iva is related to the 14 sutra called Mahesvarani sutrani in Panini's Ashtadhyayi: 1. a i un; 2. rlk; 3. e on; 4. ai auc; 5. hayavarat; 6. lan; 7. nama nana nam; 8. jha bha n; 9. gha da dha s; 10. ja ba ga da da s; 11. kha pha cha tha tha catatav; 12. kapay; 13. sa sa sar; 14. hal-iti Mahesvarani sutrani. 

Indigenous language evolution and continuum in Bharatam

 

'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for words. Language is already there among the people' Patanjali in Mahabhashya.

Bharatiya languages are a unity in semantic essence, evolving from a Linguistic Area of Sarasvati Civilization (ca. 6500 BCE to 1500 BCE) of Bharatam Janam (People of the nation of Bharata, that is India) . The Linguistic Area is a continuum in Bharatam evidenced by semantic clusters compiled in the Indian Lexicon , evidencing a cultural continuum in the nation, comparable to other dominant cultural markers. Some such markers are:s'ankha, s'ankha industry as a maritime industry in vogue even today since 6500 BCE, veneration of s'ivalinga, the tradition of wearing sindhur at the parting of the hair, cire perdue technique for bronze casting of utsava bera, ironsmelters on Ganga river basin comparable to the copper smelters of Harappa on Ravi river basin. and the use of glyphs such as svastika, rim of short-necked jar, endless-knot motif, practice of yoga and yogic postures including the salutation namaste and the acharya wearing uttariyam leaving right-shoulder bare. The language evolution is indigenous from proto-vedic times on the banks of River Sarasvati (Mleccha, Bha_s.a_, Prakrits, Des'i, Chandas), Rivers Tapati and Narmada (close to Bhimbhetka caves and Nahali language-speakers), along the Indian Ocean Rim (Tamil, Austric or Austro-asiatic) and River Ganga (Munda).

Mleccha vaacas and arya vaacas were to forms of diction; one was informal and had grammatical degrees of freedom; arya vaacas (samskrtam) had formality and grammatical refinement. Both can be derived from Proto-Vedic. Chandas for mantra is a genre different from Samskrtam, as explained below. In the context of Hanuman choosing maanusha Bhaasha (instead of Samskrtam). Muir comments in Sanskrit Texts, Part II, p. 166: '(the reference to language of a common man) may perhaps be understood not as a language in which words different from Sanskrit were used, but the employment of formal and elaborate diction.' Yes, indeed, Samskr.tam as aryavaacas was differentiated from Prakrit as mlecchavaacas only by formality and grammatical refinement of diction.]


In this passage, the reference to the language of a common man is a reference to mleccha- vaacas (Prakrit) as distinct from arya-vaacas (refined Samskr.tam which was the refined language spoken by Ravana, the Bra_hman.a king of Lanka). Valmiki depicts Hanuman as a learned scholar, versed in nine vya_karan.a (grammars), who learned s'astra from surya. Tulasi Das who wrote Ramacharitamanas in Hindi, claims with devotion that Hanuman (Anjaneya) was like his father, who fed him and brought him up. Hanuman is adored in Hindu tradition as buddhimataam varishtham 'supreme among learned people', jn~a_nima_agragan.yam, foremost among the wise. Admiring Hanuman's   communication skills, S'rirama tells Lakshmana in Kishkinda: "See how excellently Hanuman has spoken. He did not utter a single word without relevance and significance. He has not wasted a single word. Nor did he omit an appropriate word. He has not taken more time than was necessary to communicate what he wanted to convey. Every word that he spoke can never be forgotten. Such a voice prmotes general welfare and remains forever in the heard and minds for generations to come'. When Hanuman meets Sita in Lanka, he exclaims: "To find Sita here is just like listening to a person who is lacking in world culture – who tries to say something but actually says something else!" He informs his fellow soldiers in joy: 'Drushta Sita (Seen Sita!)' He started with one sentence to Sita when he met her: "Das'aratha is the king of Ayodhya," followed by a recounting of the events which led to Rama's search for Sita.

Ma_nus.am va_kyam arthavat, 'meaningful speech of the common man', deliberated Hanuman and spoke to Sita in the lingua franca of the linguistic area. The objective of this work is to delineate such a language of the common man: mlecchavaacas (ja_tibha_s.a_). The words bha_s.a_, va_cas are semantic cognates of the lexemes of Austric: basoG 'to speak, to say', basoG-bi 'to answer (a call)', just as the Austric word jel.jal is cognate with Tamil word col: jel, zel 'to say, to speak, to answer: jel.jal, zel.zel ''to discuss, to converse'. The semantic cluster may be seen from the following lexemes of Bharatiya language family: semantic cluster ' speak; language': bha_s.a_ speech (Mn.); bha_sa_ speech, language (Pali. Pkt.); ba_s. word (Wg.); ba_s.a language (Dm.); bas. (Sh.); ba_s. (D..); bha_s' (Ku.); bha_s (N.B.Mth.); language (Konkan.i); bha_sa song (OG.); baha word, saying (Si.); bas, baha (Md.): dubha_siya_ interpreter (H.)(CDIAL 9479).

Chandas

1

1 1

1 2 1

1 3 3 1

1 4 6 4 1

1 5 10 10 5 1

The first six rows of Pascal's triangle (Meru-prastaara)

Chandas will be presented as a separate study since chandas is a vedaanga together with niruktam (etyma), vya_karan.a (grammar), s'iks.a_ (learning). The roots of chandas trace back to the primordial s'abda, naada Brahman, aks.ara, OM. Chandas used for mantras are sacred sounds of va_k – the very sounds leading to formation of sentences conveying meaning – representing personal and universal consciousness. Language is thus taken beyond mere linguistics and made an integral component of aadhyaatma -- an inquiry into the nature of Being to Becoming, as a maha_vratam in yoga. Aitareya Aranyaka cites 360 types, each set related to: consonants, vowels, sibilants. Va_k is the link between thought and action; the continuum of thought-speechaction is a cosmic inquiry, an inquiry into consciousness. As music aesthetically harmonises first five natural frequencies in acoustics and pours forth in rhythmic melody, a cosmic experience is communicated and realized. Pingala (ca. 5th century BCE) – contemporary of Pa_n.ini -- is theauthor of the first-known binary numeral system of long and short syllables in treatises on prosody or poetics: Chandas s'a_stra and Chandas su_tra. In this framework, the metrics constitute a binomial theorem, elaborated further by Halayudha, mathematician of the 10th century CE in meru-prastaara (staircase of Mount Meru) or the equivalent of Pascal's triangle (which is a geometric arrangement of binomial coefficients in a triangle. Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1655, a Traité du triangle arithmétique (Treatise on arithmetical triangle) using the results to solve problems of probability theory. It is noted that commentators of Halayudha's work were aware that shallow diagonals of the triangle sum to the Fibonacci (1202) numbers (After starting values of 0 and 1, each number is the sum of two preceding numbers). In China, the triangle is called Yang Hui's triangle. Chandas was important because the purity of utterance had to be ensured and hence, the use of many error-correction procedures for chanting of the mantras to ensure the integrity of the uttered sound. These systems of error-correction were called: padapa_t.ha, kramapa_t.ha and ghanapa_t.ha. Such a language can be transliterated only using mathematical equations and representations as demonstrated by the glyptic of Meru-prastaara (or Pascal's triangle). Acharya Hemachandra (1089-1172), the kalika_la sarvagnya, who wrote on the grammars of Samskr.tam and Prakr.tam, had presented the Fibonacci numbers around 1150 CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemachandra.


Such is the legacy of bha_s.a_jnaanam – ancient language studies -- in Bharatam in a breath-taking integration of aethetics, poesy, acoustics and sacred, aadhyaatmika inquiry or yoga. Just as all natural phenomena are sacred, just as there is divinity in every phenomena, the primordial sound is also sacred, divine. This is the quintessence of Bharatiya civilizational heritage.

Farmers and languages

"A multidisciplinary scenario for South Asian prehistory I (Bellwood) would first like to point to an important observation that I do not believe has been made before. The distribution of the Indo-Aryan languages, even today (but excluding Sri Lanka) corresponds remarkably with that of the Chalcolithic cultures of the northwestern Deccan and the Ganges (sic)-Yamuna Basin. These are all characterized by a use of copper and painted pottery, usually in black on a red background, and include the Ahar, Malwa, and Horwe cultures of Rajasthan and Maharashtra. , and the Ochre Coloured Pottery and Black and Red Ware cultures of the Ganges Basin. They also, of course, include the Mature and post-Harrapan. In the Ganges Basin, as discussed in chapter 4, a strong argument can be made for cultural continuity in archaeological terms from perhaps 3000 BC into historical (Buddhist and Hindu) times (Liversage 1992). Because of this, a hypothesis of Indo-Aryan continuity through the same time-span

should be taken seriously.


The Dravidian languages as spoken today cover the region of the Southern Neolithic, with its villages of circular houses and cattle pastoralism, and domestication of a number of South Indian cereals and legumes. These southern sites have a distinct character, despite some obvious signs of connection with the northwestern Deccan . Again continuity in southern India seems likely from Neolithic through to Early Historical times, with the marked exception of the Early
Historical spread of an Indo-Aryan languages in the form of Sinhalese to Sri Lanka (Bellwood 2005, p. 213)."


Bellwood sees the Sindhu-Sarasvati civilization as multilingual (polyglot in his words). Figure 10.4 (p. 214) depicts Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Gujarat, Sindh by 3500 BCE and in the Ganga-Yamuna doab by 3000 BCE.


Source: Bellwood, Peter (2005), "First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies, Malden, MA, Oxford England: Blackwell Publishing.

Dravidian. "Food production reached South India at about 3000 BC, partly through the spread of Fertile Crescent and Sahel domesticates via the Indus Valley and the north-western Deccan, and partly through a simultaneous spread of rice cultivation from South-east Asia with speakers of Austro-Asiatic (Mundaic) languages.  In addition to these undoubted spreads of crops into India from elsewhere, Fuller (68) has recently argued for primarily (independent) origins of rice, millet, and grain domestication in the Ganges Valley and South India. The Dravidian language family is concentrated in South India, with one distinctive outlier (Brahui) far to the northwest in Pakistan, and perhaps an even more distinctive extinct outlier (Elamite) much further to the northwest in southwest Iran (Elamite's relation to Dravidian languages is debated (y69). Either Dravidian languages are the original languages of much of the Indian subcontinent or they arose to the west and spread at about 3000 BC with Fertile Crescent domesticates into the Indian subcontinent, subsequently becoming extinct in their homeland. If the latter interpretation were correct, then one would have to assume either clinal gene dilution or else language shift to explain why South Indians today are phonotypically and genetically so unlike people of the Fertile Crescent. Thus, for South Asian early agriculture, both the archaeological and linguistic records remain equivocal."

Indo-European. "We have saved for last the most intensively studied, yet still the most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics: the origin of the Indo-European language family, distributed before 1492 AD from Ireland east to the Indian subcontinent...Indo-European language family contains only 144 languages divided among 11 markedly distinct branches. These and other facts suggest that the task of reconstructing Indo-European origins is complicated by massive extinctions of Indo-European languages in the past, resulting from expansions of a few highly successful subgroups (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian). The two main competing hypotheses of Indo-European origins both face severee difficulties. One hypothesis views Proto-Indo-European as having been spoken in the steppes north of the Black Sea by horse-riding nomadic pastoralists, whose supposed domestication of the horse and invention of the wheel around 4000 BC enabled them to expand militarily (74-76). But objections include that horse domestication and riding may not have begun until thousands of years later (77), that it is hard to understand (perhaps even inconceivable) how steppe pastoralists could have imposed their language on so much of Europe west of the steppes (78); and that even linguists who reject glottochronology agree that Indo-European languages (including Anatolian) are so different from one another that their divergence probably began before 4000 BC (31). The other hypothesis, based on the recognition that the extinct Anatolian languages (inclluding Hittite and Luvian, the probable language of Troy) represent the most distinctive branch and hence the earliest documented branch and hence the earliest documented branching in the family tree, views Proto-Indo-European (or, more strictly speaking, Proto-Indo-Hittite) as a language of Neolithic Anatolian farmers who carried Fertile Crescent domesticates west into Europe, east to the Indus Valley, and north and then east across the Central Asian steppes beginning around 7000 to 6000 BC (32, 78-80). But objections include that the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European lexicon has a strong bias towards domesticated animals rather than crops (81,82) and that reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words relating to wheels and wheeled vehicles suggest (some would say 'prove') late Indo-European origins around the time of the invention of the wheel (~4000 BC)(76). Even we two authors of this paper have differeing views on this issue...

 

"We also need more studies of languages themselves. Hundreds of historically important languages remain poorly described, efforts to trace so-called deep language relationships (i.e., relations between languages that diverged long ago) remain highly controversial, and relationships of New World languages are especially controversial (43, 86, 87), due in part to the scale of loss and replacement since 1500. Fortunately, linguists are today concerned with modeling the formation of linguistic diversity in time and through space (88), and this is a development to be applauded."


Source: 2003 Farmers and their languages: the first expansions (by Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood). Science 300:597-603. http://sarasvati2.googlepages.com/diffusionoffarmingandlanguages


 

An alternative model for language studies (Notes in Annex 3)

 

Here are two book-reviews and a Scientific American article, which point to a new approach to studying history of language as history of social formations.

A reference is made to the following:

   1. Nicholas Ostler's   (2005) view of Language History of the World as the History of Empires of the World. This includes a reference to Sanskrit.
   2. Tore Jansen's (2002) Short History of Languages 

These are juxtaposed to a History of indo-european languages by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1990).

These perspectives should re-inforce the need for a Language History of Bharatam as the History of Bharatam Janam. This will be a history of the contributions made by jaati, janajaati to defining Hindu civilization and Hindu identity.  Categories of Chandas, Sanskrit (arya vaacas), Jaatibhaasha (mleccha vaacas) may provide some leads into delineating and documenting this Language History of Bharatam based on literary texts, epigraphs, songs, sculptures and akshara mushtika kathanam together with an understanding of the evolution of des'a bhaashaa jnaanam mentioned by Vatsyayana in Vidyaasamuddes'a. A magnificent beginning has been made by Prof. Malaiya. See http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~malaiya/scripts.html This database has to be carried forward, to outline a language history of bharatam. Such an effort will be a contribution to the history of thought.

This could be one alternative, after rejecting the non-falsifiable IEL.
One possible project is: History of Bharatiya Languages as the life-stream of des'a bhaashaa jnaanam of Hindu samskruti.  The context is: Itihasa Bharati. (History of jaati, janajaati as the life-stream of Bharatiya samskruti).
In particular, identifying the historical evolution of semantics of specific values mentioned in Prof. Dharam Pal Maini's magnum opus -- in various regions of Bharatam, among the jaati and janajaati traditions and ethos. Maini, Dharampal (Dr.), 2005, Manavmulya: Parak Shabdavali Ka Vishvakosh; 5 Volumes (in Hindi) xxiii, 2289p.

Breaking away from the non-falsifiable IEL, we will be rooted on firm ground, to revisit and benefit from the wealth, the nidhi of resources available in ancient texts of Bharatam starting with Niruktam, Tolkaappiyan, Panini through Bhartrhari, Bharata's Natyas'astra, Patanjali, Hemachandra, Sudhibhushan Bhattacharya to identify the evolution of language in Hindu civilization in a dynamic social contract in action. The proto-vedic continuity theory will provide a methodological framework for furthering bharatiya language studies. http://protovedic.blogspot.com/ An application of the method proposed in this article has led to the delineation of mleccha (meluhha) as the language of Sarasvati civilization. A note on `Reclaiming heritage of Bharatiya language studies' is at http://sarasvati95.googlepages.com/ with links to an ebook: `History and Formation of Bharatiya Languages', the `I' in the `IE' or the `indo-` in the `indo-european'.

 

Annex 1 Some excerpts from monographs on non-falsifiability of IEL

 

Excerpts from A. Ananth Kumar's article on India-forum ("AIT-more than meets the eye")

[quote] In his The Sanscrit Language, Jones determined that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Gothic, Celtic and Persian languages were part of a family of languages [13] which he referred to as Japhetic. [14] This word, biblical in origin, denotes European of descent. Thus the very naming of this family as Japhetic is revealing, in that it shows how non-European languages such as Samskritam, Avestan and other Indian and Iranian languages were immediately presumed to be of European origin without further justification…

The missionary Abbé Dubois, in his early 19th century Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, conflated the biblical character Magog, one of the seven sons of Japheth, with the Indian character Gautama. He then postulated that the brahmanas of India, because of their knowledge of Samskritam, were descendants of Japheth and originated in the Caucasus… [15]

By the time of Max Müller, the Japhetic language group was being referred to as the Aryan language family… [16]

Koerner [19] tells us how 19th century scholarship in the field of Indo-European languages was not devoid of racism, even after dropping terms like Japhetic and Hamitic: …After WWII, the term Indo-European would replace what were formerly called Aryan languages. [unquote]

[13] Wikipedia, William Jones, as at 26 July 2006

[14] That William Jones was influenced by and not independent of his biblical leanings is additionally corroborated by Koerner (Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language):  Sir William Jones, in 1792, still adhered largely to traditional biblical scholarship, which set the date of the Flood as about 2,350 B.C Jones also took Genesis to be true, including the Babel myth: we may for the present assume, that the second, or silver, age of the Hindus was subsequent to the dispersion from Babel. Because of the many indologists who were working entirely from and for the Christian perspective, the biblical account of history was first made secure by condensing Indian history to fit into the Christian chronology.


[15] Abbé J.A. Dubois, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, 1816 (p. 100-103). Scans of these pages: 100-101, 102-103  The languages native to Caucasia (the Caucasus region) are called Caucasian languages. They are non-Indo-European. Since IE languages are not native to Caucasia and most of them arrived there in later times, this makes Abbé Dubois' suggestion - that the Samskritam-speaking brahmanas must have originated in the Caucasus - another of his uninformed conjectures. Caucasia, Microsoft Encarta 2002 (Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.)  Caucasia or Caucasus mountainous region ... includes the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, as well as a portion of far southern Russia. ... The region's native Caucasian languages are usually divided into two main groups: North Caucasian and South Caucasian. ...The most widely spoken South Caucasian language is Georgian. Caucasia also has a number of Indo-European languages, including Armenian, Russian, and Ukrainian, as well as languages of the Indo-Iranian languages subfamily such as Kurdish and Ossetic. The third major language group in Caucasia consists of Altaic languages, including the Turkic languages Azeri and Karachay-Balkar. In the Northern part of Caucasia, Ossetic, a modern Iranian language (modern remnant of Sarmatian), is spoken. North Ossetia is also known as Alania - derived from the Alans, a Sarmatian tribe who had moved into this region in the 4th century BCE. The various Sarmatian tribes, just like the Scythians, all spoke Iranian languages. The Altaic languages (non-IE) spoken in Caucasia are also from recent times. The Slavic IE languages Russian and Ukrainian are spoken in North Caucasia, because this is the region where Russia borders Caucasia. In South Caucasia (Transcaucasia), Armenian is one of the IE languages spoken; and because this is where Caucasia borders Iran and Kurdistan, Iranian languages like Kurdish are also spoken here. It is also interesting to note that most of the languages spoken by the very people who have been considered as having the original European (Caucasian) features, are languages that are not part of the Indo-European language family at all.


[16] Friedrich Max Müller, Science of Language, Vol. 1 (p.460).
Max Müller was not the first to refer to the whole language family as Aryan, but he helped popularise it. Anquetil-Duperron had already come up with the term in 1763, after which the 19th century indologists Schlegel and Pictet used the same in their works.
Indo-Germanic was also used for a time (in place of what is now called Indo-European), often with the attendant notions of race.

[19] E. F. K. Koerner, Linguistics and Ideology in the Study of Language, University of Ottawa.

http://www.india-forum.com/articles/153/1/The-AIT-:-More-than-meets-the-eye

Excerpts from the following works (1999 to 2006):

1. Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols:  Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

2. Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth:  Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press.

3. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (2001), Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure, Anatoly Liberman (Ed.), translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman, Durham and London:  Duke University Press.

4. Melchert, Craig (2001), "Critical Response to the Last Four Papers, "  in Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.

1. Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols:  Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

"For over two hundred years, a series of historians, linguists, folklorists, and archaeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture.  Using ancient texts, medieval records, philological observations, and archaeological remains they have described a world, a religion, and a people older than the Sumerians, with whom all history is said to have begun.  Those who maintained this culture have been called "Indo-Europeans" and "Proto-Indo-Europeans," "Aryans," and "Ancient Aryans,"  "Japhetites," and "wiros," among many other terms.  These people have not left behind any texts, no objects can definitely be tied to them, nor do we know any "Indo-European" by name.  In spite of that, scholars have stubbornly tried to reach back to the ancient "Indo-Europeans," with the help of bold historical, linguistic, and archaeological reconstructions, in the hopes of finding the foundation of their own culture and religion there.

The fundamental thesis of this study is that these prehistoric peoples have preoccupied people in modern times primarily because they were, to use the word of Claude Levi-Strauss, "good to think with," rather than because they were meaningful historical actors.  The interest in the "Indo-Europeans," "Aryans" and their "others" (who have varied through history from Jews to savages, Orientals, aristocrats, priests, matriarchal peasants, warlike nomads, French liberals, and German nationalists), stemmed-and still stems-from a will to create alternatives to those identities that have been provided by tradition.  The scholarship about the Indo-Europeans, their culture, and their religion has been an attempt to create new categories of thought, new identities, and thereby a future different from the one that seemed to be prescribed (Arvidsson 2006, p. xi)."

"On a more general level, the debate is about whether there is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse-perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race (Arvidsson 2006, p.3)."

"Formulated in accordance with R. G. Collingwood's thought, the same question would be "To what "ideological" problem were the Indo-Europeans the solution?" More recently, Quentin Skinner has pointed to the philological rule that a text can be understood only if one also understands why it exists in the first place; understanding is about understanding not only WHAT is in the text but WHY it is there.  The aim of this book is, in other words, to examine what ideological motives causes an array of scholars during the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries to become interested in Indo-European religion and culture and made them prioritize certain historical areas and sources, choose certain perspectives and hypotheses instead of others, and make certain kinds of associations or use a certain rhetoric (Arvidsson 2006, p.5, emphasis in the original)."

"However the main reason why scholarship about the Indo-Europeans has tended to produce myths is that so many who have written (and read) about it have interpreted it as concerning THEIR OWN ORIGIN:  "We all have a need to understand," writes, for example Danish scholar of Iranian studies, Jes P. Asmussen, "What our Indo-European" forefathers felt and thought."  The research on the Indo-Europeans has created a "web of scientific myths," to use Vernant's phrase, because it has dealt with "our origins" and hence, about the way "we" should do things.  However, as we shall see later on, there have been many scholars who have resisted presenting the Indo-Europeans as "our true ancestor"—some (scholars of Jewish ancestry) because the Indo-Europeans could not possibly have been their forefathers, and others because they disproved of the mythologization for various reasons, even though they themselves might have been defined as "Indo-Europeans," (Arvidsson 2006, p.8, emphasis in the original)."

"The idealization of India was not, of course, about contemporary India, but rather an India that was given the epithet "classical," borrowed from classical antiquity—an India that could be glimpsed among ruins, old statues, Sanskrit manuscripts, and Brahmanic teachings.  Jones is very clear on this point:  "Nor can we reasonably doubt, how degenerate and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear, that in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge."  The ancient Indians appeared to Jones to be people related to the Greeks and Romans, who had been idealized by humanists since the Renaissance (Arvidsson 2006, p.23)."

"The hypothesis that somewhere, sometime, an Indo-European race has existed has always been anchored in linguistic observations. But during the nineteenth century, racial anthropologist also began to discuss the Indo-Europeans, which came to mean that the proprietorship of philologists in Indo-European research was questioned (Arvidsson 2006, p.41)."

"The theory about India as the original home of the Indo-Europeans, and the Indians as a kind of model Aryans, lost supporters during the nineteenth century, and other homelands and other model Aryans took their place instead (Arvidsson 2006, p.52)."

"The emergence of the discipline of folklore is intimately connected to nationalism.  This is especially clear with the founders of the discipline, the brothers Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (author of the Grimm's Law of comparative Indo-European linguistics) Grimm (1785-1863).  The purpose of their famed project of collecting folktales from the German peasant population was primarily to (re-) create a strong German culture that could free itself from dependence on "foreign" cultures.  One step in this project was to show that there existed a rich "German" mythology that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions.  The fact that the brothers Grimm had to look for mythical histories among the contemporary peasantry was connected to the state of the source material:  there were almost no texts about an ancient "German" mythology ((Arvidsson 2006, pp.131-132, second parenthesis added)."

"Since this discipline (folklore) arose in what became Germany in 1871, this change (the rising importance of folklore rather than philology) meant that the Indo-Europeans began to look less and less like the Indians and the Iranians, and more and more like Germans.  This meant, in turn, that they became less civilized and more primitive and barbaric.  The image of the Indo-Europeans as a primitive tribe received an additional boost from the discipline of the Indo-Europeans of prehistoric archaeology.  When archaeologists became involved in the debate about the Indo-Europeans, the Germanic's position was further strengthened within the comparative work, and the original home of the Indo-Europeans was moved from the noble and exotic Asia to the rustic European homeland (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 141-142, parentheses added)."

"There were many reasons for this shift (of homeland from Asia to Europe).  First of all, the hypothesis of a European homeland accorded with the folklore's focus on Germanic material.  A second, closely related reason was that the idea of a northern European homeland was in line with the strong German nationalism that bloomed after the Franco-Prussian War and Germany's unification.  One's native land now became more valuable than any dreamed-of colonizable, but foreign lands.  Thirdly, the ideas of racial anthropology gained more and more credibility, and according to them, Europe was the origin of the e white Aryan race ((Arvidsson 2006, p.142, parenthesis added)."

"It was thus from this area (which Germany had recently annexed) that the greatest of all cultural peoples, the blue-eyed, long-skulled, Indo-Germanic race, had emigrated to civilize the world.  According to Kossina, the Indo-Germanic race had attended its cultural-hero status purely because of racial-biological factors.  On their migrations, southwards, the racially pure Indo-Germans had nonetheless become contaminated and this was why their cultural-heroic exploits in Greece, Rome and India had not become enduring (Arvidsson 2006, p.144)."

"The "primitivization" of the Indo-Europeans was also stimulated by the fact that the Indo-Europeans were decreasingly linked to high-cultural India..  It is revealing that Hermann Hirt, probably the foremost philologist of the turn of the century, claimed that "many Indo-Iranian concepts should rather be traced to Babylon than to the Indo-Germans."  Instead the Indo-Europeans were now increasingly associated with Germanic barbarians (Arvidsson 2006, p.176)."

"For Hofler and Wikander, it was inconceivable that the "light" and noble Indo-Europeans that the nature mythologists and order ideologists had reconstructed had been able to conquer most of Eurasia.  In order to carry out such a deed, they reasoned, the Indo-Europeans would mainly need not a high-standing culture, but a barbaric primal force, a force like the one the Germans had had during the Great Migration.  As a commentary to Wikander's book about the Iranian male-fellowship god Vayu, Hofler writes that "the Indo-European expansion toward Asia has the same form of political structure as the later Germanic expansion, the Germanic kingdom of Wodan bears similar strengths as the first heroic age of the Indo-Europeans."   According to Hofller it is only in light of the research on male fellowships and the "the discovery of the ur-Indo-German social structure" that the expansion can be understood.  In Der arische Mannerbund, Wikander writes something similar:  "The Maruts reflect the warrior aspect, which the male fellowships of the Aryan tribes had developed preferentially during the age of migration and conquest."  Hofler and Wikander argues that the model of conquest that had been developed to explain the fact that the Indo-European languages were spread across Europe and Asia at the dawn of history required the Indo-Europeans to be exceptionally dynamic and uninhibited warriors (Arvidsson 2006, p. 222)."

"During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georges Dumezil's theory of Indo-European mythology) have completely dominated research about Indo-European religion and culture—in spite of the fact that they arose in an ideological atmosphere that did not differ much from the Nazi one (Arvidsson 2006, p. 239, parentheses added)."

"Hehn argued that, it was risky, in the attempts to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European culture, to depend too much on linguistic paleontology, whose methodological accuracy he doubted.  How can we be sure, for example, that the Proto-Indo-Europeans owned tame horses simply because we can reconstruct the word for horse (*h1ekuos)?  Did they perhaps only know about the animal, without having domesticated it?  Or how do we know that *h3evis denoted "goat" and not some other similar animal, and that it has not acquired the meaning "goat" later? (Arvidsson 2006, p. 255)."

"In Gimbutas's case I (Arvidsson) think that many readers of her work have sensed that there is another agenda behind her theoretical constructions, in addition to the clearly feminist agenda.  This subtext probably is related to the fact that she was forced into exile by the Bolshevik troops who invaded her homeland, Lithuania, in 1944-45, moving across the Baltic and eastern Europe.  There is something very "Cold War" about her theories and about the maps she draws of Indo-European invasions of eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula.  In any case, a connection can be observed between not idealizing, or even disapproving of, Indo-Europeans, and placing their homeland on Slavic ground (Arvidsson 2006, p.293)."

"For those who have approached the question of the origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages from the angle of philology, the great problem has been that there are no texts about migrations, much less about military invasions… From the Rigveda, people have taken passages that tell about the Aryans' attacks on cities and concluded that they then must have been a foreign, warlike, nomadic people.  Nor does Roman, Hittite, Slavic, Celtic, or Germanic, written material mention migrations or conquests from the time when the Indo-Europeans supposedly emigrated from their original home. The philologists have, however, been able to pint to certain loanwords, especially topographic and hydrographic names, as evidence of migration.  But the cornerstone of philologists' work has been linguistic paleontology, which tried to re-create, through comparisons, a vocabulary that indicates knowledge about certain objects and phenomena (Arvidsson 2006, p.295)."

"Renfrew bases his critique of linguistic paleontology particularly on an article by J. Fraser from 1926, but it is also in line with the criticism that Victor Hehn expressed.  Several linguists, as well, have remained skeptical about the possibilities and axioms of linguistic paleontology.  Most debated is the Russian structuralist Prince Niklaj Trubestkoj (1890-1938), who argues in the famous article "Gedanken uber das Indogermanenproblem" (1936) although it is possible that the similarities between the Indo-European languages are due to a common origin, this hypothesis is not necessary.  He found that notion of an original language (the family tree model) more romantic than scientific and imagined that the genetic classification might be replaced with a structuralist one (Arvidsson 2006, p.296)."

"The historian of religions Ulf Drobin clarifies Trubetzkoy's point:  "all classification must stem from criteria.  The followers of the language tree theory avoid definite criteria and replace them with a concept of language that is BOTH changeable (in time) and constant (Indo-European).  In the final analysis they end up in paradoxes and mysticism.  Ur-Indo-European must either lack prehistory, or it must have a non-Indo-European prehistory.  The latter, however, cannot be explained with out some form of criteria" (Arvidsson 2006, p.297, emphasis and parentheses in the original)."

"The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to represent an objective, scientific body of research that contrasts sharply with the Nazis' misuse of the Indo-Europeans.  But as we have seen in this chapter, there is no reason to stop critically analyzing the ideology of Indo-European scholarship.  If Dumezil and Gimbutas have each represented a constructive research tradition,  Bruce Lincoln can represent the tradition of ideological critique among scholars of Indo-European heritage (Arvidsson 2006, pp. 301-302)."

"According to Lincoln, then, Indo-European research misses what is instructive about studying myths and religious texts in the first place, since it demand that the researchers leave the historically and socially determined place in which they were used in order to reach the imagined Ancient Arya., "the never-never land east of the asterisk," to use the expression of Lincoln's colleague Wendy Doniger (Arvidsson 2006, p. 303)."

"Most notable is perhaps that no one reacted to the fact that the editor of the world-leading journal for research on the Indo-Europeans, Journal of Indo-European Studies, Roger Pearson, had since the 1950's has been "one of America's foremost Nazi apologists and quite clearly a racist with one of the world's best web of contacts."  Before Pearson, along with Marija Gimbutas , Edgar C. Polome' and Raimo Antilla, founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, he had worked with Hans F. K. Gunther, who had continued to spread his racial doctrines after the fall of the Third Reich.  Pearson was also chairman of the American Division of the World Anti Communist League and lobbied in Washington for more funds for the Defense, the Contras, and the UNITA guerillas.  Together with Polome', one of the United States' leading researchers in the area of Germanic religion, he has also published the academic, racist journal the Mankind Quarterly (Arvidsson 2006, p. 304)."

2. Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth:  Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press.

"Given the unhappy example of scholarship on myth, particularly that on Aryan or Indo-European myth, is one forced to conclude that scholarly discourse is simply another instance of ideology in narrative form?  The topic is a painful but important one for me, as I continue my struggle to extricate from a discipline, a paradigm, and a discourse that I adopted early in my academic career with insufficient critical reflection.  To a certain extent, writing this book has been an attempt to undo my (Lincoln's) earlier lack of awareness and make amends for it (Lincoln 1999, p. xii)."

"As a student of history of religions, I (Lincoln) was taught that Fredric Max Muller inaugurated our discipline but his work on "comparative mythology" foundered on his own incompetence, as did the later attempt of Sir James George Frazer.  The field was rescued, so the narrative went, by Dumezil with the support of some talented colleagues, Wikander, Otto Hoffer, Jan De Vries, and Emile Benveniste among them.  Older scholars also entered my awareness, including Hermann Guntert, Herman Lommel, Walter Wust, Rudolf Much, Franz Altheirm, Richard Reitzenstein, and Hans Heinrich Schaeder, and many of these men were deeply involved with the Nazi movement.  To that side of their work, however, I was largely blind.  Instead of dangerous ideologues, I saw talented linguists, erudite Orientalist (a word not yet suspect), and trailblazing students of myth.  Whatever questions I had—and they were not many—were deftly deflected.  The "Aryan thesis" was fundamentally sound, I was told, although  Hitler and Co.  had badly abused it.  But no one spoke of "Aryans'" anymore or located their (presumed) Urheimat in Scandinavia, Germany, or the North Pole.  Rather, the postwar discourse dealt with Indo-Europeans, elided questions of race, and placed the origin of this sanitized people off to the east, on the Russian steppes.  IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, I (LINCOLN) HOPE TO SHOW THAT THINGS ARE NOT THAT SIMPLE AND THE PROBLEMS—MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL— THAT ATTEND THIS DISCOURSE OR DISCIPLINE ARE NOT SO EASILY RESOLVED (Lincoln 1999, pp. xii-xiv, emphasis added)."

"Reading Jones with these preconceptions and interests, Germans rapidly came to see themselves as a Volk with a much deeper, more glorious, and more heroic past than anyone previously dared to imagine.  Germans were relieved of the need to compete with Greeks and Romans, for they now discovered themselves part of the same primordial group.  Since India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group, interest in Sanskrit burgeoned, as did the prestige for all things ancient and Indic, particularly after publication of Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), which made the case for India as the Aryan homeland (Lincoln 1999, pp. 55-56)."

"One might think this position (that the English colonialist should convert their Indian "brethren" to the Gospel) would have endeared Max Muller to missionaries, but in fact it did not.  Rather, they found him entirely too sympathetic to the "heathen" and suspected him of being insufficiently committed to the faith.  Accordingly, in 1860 he was passed over for Oxford's Boden chair in Sanskrit, which carried responsibility for preparing the Sanskrit-English dictionary, both of which were intended, under the terms of Lt-Col Boden's will, to advance the conversion of Indians to Christianity, not to foster English understanding or respect for India (Lincoln 1999, p. 68, parenthesis added)."

"His accomplishments and large body of admirers notwithstanding, Jones's reputation has slipped in recent years, particularly since Edward Said traced the genealogy of Orientalism—that is, an acquisitive, dominating, classifying, and distorting exercise of knowledge and power in the service of Western imperial interests—directly to Sir William's door (Lincoln 1999, p. 84)."

"Since the atrocities of the Nazis in the Second World War, the term "Aryan" has virtually disappeared from polite conversation.  Scholars who wish to pursue the old discourse while marking their distance from its less savory aspects now use the term "(Proto-)Indo-European," also a coinage of the nineteenth century. In doing so, many sincerely believe they have thereby sanitized the discourse and solved the problems, but things are not so simple.  Often such euphemizing attempts are incomplete, superficial, evasive, and disingenuously amnesiac (Lincoln 1999, pp. 94-95)."

"In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken.  FOR ALL THIS, NEED IT BE SAID, THERE IS NO SOUND EVIDENTIARY WARRANT (Lincoln 1999, p. 95, emphasis added)"

"Scholars from Sir William Jones to the PRESENT imagined this group (Aryans aka Indo-Europeans) as their most ancient ancestors and created for them an account of origins that, in its many variants, carried biblical, colonialist, racist, Orientalist, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and militarist valences at one time or another (Lincoln 1999, pp. 211-212, parenthesis and emphasis added).

"Conceivably, the Stammbaum theory is correct, although its logic involves leaps that are open to question.  First, it explains the relation among the Indo-European languages as the result of divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache.  In theory, however, one can also explain this as resulting from processes of convergence, rather than divergence, as N. S. Trubetzkoy argued in a famous article published on the eve of the Second World War.  Pace the Stammbaum, Trubetzkoy offered a wave model, in which each group in a string of peoples had its own language and interacted socially and linguistically with its neighbors (Lincoln 1999, p. 212)."

"Other authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds, observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single, ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it.  Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahili—an artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument  to facilitate long distance trade—may be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing Proto-Indo-European.  His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity.  In Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community of Proto-Indo-Europeans.  Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position, intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage spoken not be an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples," (Lincoln 1999, pp. 212-213)."

"And when the aggressive tendency to conflate the Aryan with the Nordic caused alarm in the 1920's and the 1930's, scholars who had their reasons for opposing the Nazis, like Sigmund Feist (1865-1943), V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957), and Wilhelm Koppers (1886-1961) advocated a homeland out on the Russian steppes.  After the Nazis and their views had been defeated, Marija Gimbutas won considerable support for this thesis in a series of publications that began in 1956.  As she fleshed out her ideas in later decades, however, it became clear she had a more complicated story to tell.  Her invasionary narrative drew a sharp contrast between aggressive, patriarchal, nomadic and artistically incompetent Indo-Europeans from the "Kurgan culture" of the steppes and the pacific, matrifocal, agricultural aesthetically sophisticated, much more ancient and admirable Old Europeans of Mitteleuropa.  The Soviet takeover of her native Lithuania was a transparent subtext.

When Gimbutas' s views had become near hegemonic, Colin Renfrew challenged them, arguing for a homeland in Anatolia at a much earlier date than others had posited.  This let him associate the Indo-European dispersal with the slow, peaceful diffusion of agriculture rather than a rapid expansion by military might.  Other theories have proliferated in recent year, most of them fueled by parochial nationalisms.  Georgians favor the Caucasus, Indian the Hindu Kush, Armenians Armenia, and others imply insist on the autochthony of their own people and reject any theory of dispersal or invasions.

All of these exercises in scholarship (= myth+footnotes) suffer from the same problem.  They attempt to reach far back into prehistory that no textual sources are available to control the inquiry, but where archaeology offers a plethora of data.  IN practice, all the remains found throughout Eurasia for a period of several millennia can be constituted as evidence from which to craft the final narrative, but it is often the researchers' desires that determine their principles of selection.  When neither the data nor the criticism of one's colleagues inhibits desire-driven invention, the situation is ripe for scholarship as myth.  Prehistory here becomes "pre—" in a radical sense:  a terrain of frustration and opportunity where historians-cum-mythographers can offer origin accounts—complete with heroes, adventurers, great voyages, and primordial paradise lost—all of which reflect and advance the interests of those who tell them.  Ideology in narrative form (Lincoln 1999, p. 215)."

"The position I (Lincoln) urge is the following.   First, we accept as established the existence of a language family that included Tocharian, Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Anatolian, Greek, Italic, Phrygian, Thracian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic.  Second, we acknowledge that the relations among these languages can be described in several fashions.  Of the available hypotheses, the Stammbaum model is the most popular, but by no means the only one.  It ought not to be accepted as long as others exists, and we ought not discard these others unless there is compelling reason to do so.  In the absence of such compelling reason, we can remain agnostic, recognizing the existence of multiple hypotheses and maintaining a particularly skeptical posture toward those with histories of subtexts of racism.  Third, we recognize that the existence of a language family does not necessarily imply the existence of a protolanguage.  Still less the existence of a protopeople, protomyths, protoideology, or protohomeland (Lincoln 1999, p. 216)."

3. Trubetzkoy, N. S. (2001), Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure, Anatoly Liberman (Ed.), translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman, Durham and London:  Duke University Press.

Determining genetic descent among languages

"It is usually supposed that, at one time, there was a single Indo-European language, the so-called Indo-European protolanguage, from which all historically attested Indo-European languages are presumed to descend.  This supposition is contradicted by the fact that, no matter how far we peer back into history, we always find a multitude of Indo-European-speaking peoples.  The idea of an Indo-European protolanguage is not absurd, but it is not necessary, and we can do very well without it (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 87)."

"Kretschmer (1896) has rightly emphasized that the only difference between borrowing and genetic relation is one of chronology. We recognize as borrowings those words that entered Germanic from Celtic or Italic and entered Slavic from Germanic only after the Germanic sound shift [because they do not confirm to certain sound laws…Words that had taken the same path before the sound shift, on the other hand, are regarded as belonging to the common stock.  Strictly speaking, we ascribe to the protolanguage all elements that occur in several branches of Indo-European and for which the direction of borrowing can no longer be determined. [The same happens in other language families], (Trubetzkoy 2001, pp. 87-88)"

Q: How can the IEL then determine chronology based on the genetic tree model if the assumption of genetic descent is itself based on chronology?

"There is therefore, no compelling reason for the assumption of a homogeneous Indo-European protolanguage from which the individual branches of Indo-European descended.  It is equally plausible that the ancestors of the branches of Indo-European were originally dissimilar but that over time, through continuous contact, mutual influence, and loan traffic, they moved significantly closer to each other, without becoming identical (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 88)."

"But if scholars had only several semi-Romance languages like Albanian at their disposal and applied to them the comparative method as it is practiced in Indo-European studies, they would be obliged to reconstruct a protolanguage for the semi-Romance group as well.  In doing so they would either have to leave the non-Romance elements unexplained or have to explain them by means of some clever artificial provisions in the reconstruction of the "proto-language."  The picture would become even more complicated if history had preserved the descendants of several groups that had begun converging but then stopped.  All of them would share some elements, and comparatives would have to reconstruct another "protolanguage" from the common features of their morphology and vocabulary and from the regular sound correspondences.  This protolanguage would not be particularly difficult to reconstruct, even though it quite obviously never existed

Thus a language family can be the product of divergence, convergence or a combination of the two (with emphasis on either).  There are virtually no criteria that would indicate unambiguously to which of the two modes of development a family owes its existence.  When we are dealing with languages so closely related that almost all the elements of vocabulary and morphology of each are present in all or most of the other members (allowing for sound correspondences), it is more natural to assume convergence than divergence (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 89)."

"Be that as it may, the Indo-European family does not consist of very closely connected branches.  Each branch possesses numerous elements of vocabulary and morphology not matched by the others. In this respect, Indo-European differs greatly from such families as Turkic, Semitic and Bantu.  Therefore, it is equally probable that the Indo-European family arose when some originally non-related languages (the ancestors of the later branches) converged and that the Indo-European languages developed from a protolanguage by divergence.]

This possibility must always be kept in sight when the Indo-European problem is addressed [and every statement about the problem should be formulated so as to be valid for either assumption:  divergence or convergence.]  Since only the hypothesis of a single protolanguage has been considered until now, the discussion has landed on the wrong track.  Its primary, that is, linguistic, nature has been forgotten.  Prehistoric archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology have been brought in without any justification.  Attempts are made to describe the home, race, and culture of a supposed Indo-European proto-people that may never have existed.  The Indo-European problem is formulated [by modern German (and not only German) scholars] in something like the following way:  "Which type of prehistoric pottery must be ascribed to the Indo-European people?"  But scholarship is unable to answer questions of this kind, so they are moot.  Their logic is circular because the assumption of an Indo-European protopeople with definite cultural and racial characteristics is untenable.  We are chasing a romantic illusion instead of keeping to the one positive fact at out disposal—that "Indo-Europeans" a purely LINGUISTIC concept (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 90, emphasis in the original)."

"The only scientifically admissible question is, How and where (Trubetzkoy does not say when) did the Indo-European linguistic structure arise? And this question should and can be answered by purely linguistic methods.  The answer depends on what we mean by the INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUSITIC STRUCTURE (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 91, emphasis in the original, parenthesis added)."

"Languages can thus cease to be Indo-European, and they can become Indo-European.  "Indo-European" was born when all six specific structural features mentioned above first came together in a language whose vocabulary and morphology displayed a series of regular correspondences with the later-attested Indo-European languages.  It is not impossible that several languages became Indo-European in this sense at roughly the same time.  [If this is true, then originally several Indo-European languages existed in a so-called language union, which later developed into a language family.]  We can consider them today in retrospect only as dialects of the Indo-European protolanguage, but it is not logically necessary to trace them all back to one common source.  Only geographic contact among these oldest Indo-European dialects may be assumed with a high degree of certainty (Trubetzkoy 2001, pp. 93-94)."

"Thus, the area in which the oldest Indo-European dialects arose must be situated somewhere between the areas of Finno-Ugric and the Caucasian Mediterranean languages. [To be sure, this localization is rather vague, the more so as we have no idea how far north the Mediterranean language families spread in the remote past (at present we find their representatives by the Bay of Biscay and in the northern Caucasus).]  A more precise location cannot be determined. Above all, we must combat the prejudice that the so-called Indo-European protolanguage occupied a narrowly defined area (Trubetzkoy 2001, p. 95)."

"[There is only one reason that linguists have always considered the agglutinative languages inferior to the inflectional ones:  they themselves have been native speakers of the later group… I am inclined, therefore, to think that the Indo-European linguistic structure arose through a process of outgrowing a primitive inflecting type, without, however, reaching the more highly developed agglutinative type (Trubetzkoy 2001, pp. 97-98)."

4. Melchert, Craig (2001), "Critical Response to the Last Four Papers" in Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.

 

 "Basing Grand Conclusions On Extremely Limited Evidence."

"Of the lexical items discussed by Professor Darden, only horse, yoke, bovine, and most crucially wool (wheel is conspicuously absent from this list) clearly meet both criteria (for the validity of reconstructed PIE vocabulary).  The word for harness pole is somewhat less secure due to uncertainties about its morphology.  Hittite hissa matches Sanskrit isa- (the few Hittite spelling with e have no probative value), but their relationship to Avestan aesa and Greek oi** is anything but clear.  The status of the verb to harness must be regarded as quite uncertain (a *ye/ o-present would be a trivial innovation in both Indic and Anatolian).

The limitations on Professor Darden's approach lie in the available data.  The number of usable vocabulary items from the "secondary products revolution" will be limited in the first place.  When we then add the two strict but necessary linguistic requirements cited above, we are inevitable going to restrict the usable data set to a very few items.  We are then likely to be left in the uncomfortable situation of basing grand conclusions on extremely limited evidence (Melchert 2001, p. 235, first two parentheses added)."

Annex 2

Notes on horses with 17 pairs of ribs

There are living horses with 17 pairs of ribs. This is conclusive evidence that there was a genus among equidae which had 17 pairs of ribs, on thoracic vertebrae. Here is a note from an expert in palaeobiology who notes that it is possible that atleast some hipparions had 17 pairs of ribs. A horse's first pair of ribs are stouter and slightly differently shaped than the other bones and there is a possibility that this pair of the ribcage was left out of the count. But, given the paleontological evidence and the existence of a living genus with 17 pairs of ribs, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the count mentioned in the R.gveda r.ca.

This establishes with reasonable certainty that thestatement in the R.gveda r.ca 1.162.18 is scientifically correct.

Some however claim that the name of equus sivalensis should correctly be named E. caballus pumpelli or Hipparion sivalensis, a genus which survived in northern India quite late in the Pleistocene. "Equus sivalensis" is just a way to say "horse of the Siwalik hills" in Latin. Whether it is equus sivalensis or hipparion sivalensis, it is possible that many horses of this genus had 17 pairs of ribs of thoracic vertebrae.

Living species of horses with 17 pairs of ribs: a scientific, palaeontological perspective

The number of ribs in mammals corresponds to the number of thoracic vertebrae.  For horses, the ususal number is 18 thoracic vertebrae, and therefore 18 pairs of ribs (36 ribs in all).  Some living horse have 19 thoracic vertebrae (and hence 38 ribs), and rarely 17 has been recorded too (and hence 34 ribs).   We have a quarter horse mounted in our gallery with 18 pairs of ribs, and a Shetland pony mounted with 17 pairs of ribs.  So there is variation even in the living species.

This number of thoracic vertebrae seen in horses is somewhat higher than that seen in most other mammals: humans, cats, dogs, deer and many  rodents have 13 thoracics, most weasels have 14, most seals have 14 or 15, the blue whale has 16.  I have looked at diagrams of mounts of fossil horses in books and in our gallery, and most seem to have 18, until you go back into the earliest horses, where there seems to be a few less, but different mounts seem to vary on this number.  All fossil horses going back at least 20 million years or so seem to have 18 thoracics and therefore 18 pairs of ribs.  So I would guess that this increase in vertebral count happened very early in horse evolution, and the number seems to have been pretty stable since then.  Therefore the hipparions and other fossil horses you mention should have had 18 pairs of ribs.  Although knowing that even in the living horse there is variation, then it is *also quite possible that at least SOME hipparions had 17 pairs of ribs.

Mammals have lost their cervical and lumbar ribs which are characteristic of many reptilian groups.  The first rib in many mammals, including horses, is shorter and expanded and therefore appears a bit different from the others.  But it looks essentially similar in all horses, so I wouldn't think that it would have been excluded from a count of ribs (but I do not know this for sure).

Kevin Seymour, Ph.D.
Assistant Curator, Palaeobiology
Royal Ontario Museum [Personal communication of 21 November 2000].

http://www.hindunet.org/saraswati/horse5.htm
Annex 3

An alternative model for language studies

Speaking of tongues: Nicholas Ostler's survey of the world's linguistic histories, Empires of the Word, fascinates Martin Jacques

Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian  

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
by Nicholas Ostler
615pp, HarperCollins, ?30  

 

There are many ways of recounting the history of the world - via the rise and fall of civilisations, the fortunes of nation states, socio-economic systems and patterns, the development of technology, or the chronology of war and military prowess. This book tells the story through the rise and decline of languages. It is a compelling read, one of the most interesting books I have read in a long while. 

 

Nicholas Ostler does not adopt a narrowly linguistic approach - based on the structure of languages and their evolution - but instead looks at the history of languages, the reasons for their rise and, as a rule, also their fall. While it is a history of languages, it is at the same time a history of the cultures and civilisations from which they sprang. The book concentrates on those languages that have been - in some form or another - globally influential: they include Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the main European languages, not least English.  

In defence of the centrality of language in human history, Ostler argues that it is language that enables people to form communities and to share a common history: indeed, by the very act of the old teaching the young to speak, language is also central to the establishment and reproduction of tradition. He describes very well how languages reflect and articulate the cultures and histories of different communities: indeed, unless you speak the vernacular, it is impossible properly to understand another people. From his rich picture of why major languages have waxed and waned, it is clear that there is no single model: on the contrary, while Ostler does his best to categorise and conceptualise, there are in fact almost as many models as there are languages. For all the hubris about the rise of English and how it will rule the world's tongues for ever, it is sobering to reflect on why languages that in their day seemed utterly irresistible in their dominance and prestige, spoken across large regions of the world for thousands of years, were eventually eclipsed.  

 

There is Greek, whose fortunes were tied only loosely to Greek civilisation and which somehow managed to hitch a ride on the Roman empire and become, as the prestige language of learning, an integral part of that historical era too. There is Latin itself, which ultimately failed to outlive the imperium and which slowly transmuted into the vernacular Romance languages. There is Sanskrit, which spread from northern India across the sub-continent, largely on the back of Hinduism, and then - though no one quite knows how - to southeast Asia. Codified 2,500 years ago and barely changed since, this was a language that took great pleasure in its own beauty, which was intimately bound up with an Indian worldview, but which was ultimately to ossify to such an extent that today, although still an official language of India, it is spoken by fewer than 200,000 people.  

 

And then there is Chinese. Chinese history is an exemplar of exceptionalism and the Chinese language entirely conforms to this pattern. Its written system dates back around 4,000 years and during that time it has changed remarkably little. Ostler's explanation for its longevity is interesting: Chinese civilisation is highly centred and averse to disunity; like Egyptian civilisation, it owed allegiance to an emperor who enjoyed a "mandate from heaven"; and the sheer density of population in its heartlands during ancient times largely prevented "swamping" by other languages. In a world now dominated by alphabetic languages, Chinese, based on characters, remains a pictographic tongue. This is why the same Chinese written system can serve equally well for the many different Chinese dialects (sometimes described as languages) and thereby provide a powerful source of unity for such a huge and wide-ranging population.  

A major turning point comes around AD1500. Before that, the spread of languages was essentially by means of land routes, which meant that the growth of a language was relatively slow and usually organic. After 1500, the major form of expansion was by sea. The classic mode of language growth in the new European era was by means of military conquest: by contrast, languages such as Sanskrit and Chinese had spread largely by means of the successful natural growth of language communities. Indeed, it is salutary to learn that it has mainly been western cultures - Greek, Roman, French, Dutch, Portuguese, British and American, together with Islam - that have sought to impose themselves, and their languages, on others. Otherwise, the expansion of languages, notably the great Asian languages, has been organic rather than by force. Once language expansion could be achieved by force - or what Ostler describes as mergers and acquisitions - the pace of language growth was enormously accelerated.  

 

European expansion started with the Portuguese, followed by the Spanish and the Dutch. The spread of language was generally an integral part of the imperial, "civilising" mission. The impact varied enormously from continent to continent, country to country. While many Latin American countries to this day speak Spanish, in another former colony, the Philippines, the linguistic legacy remains marginal. The Dutch, via the Boer settlers, bequeathed Afrikaans to South Africa, but in their largest and most populous colony, the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, the Dutch language was never widely spoken.  

 

As this example suggests, the most important way in which the invader language usually took root was through the migration of settlers from the imperial centre: where migration did not happen on any great scale, the chances of a language prospering in the long run were much weaker. The reason why the English language became so dominant in its colonies in the United States, Australia and New Zealand was primarily because of large-scale migration from Britain.  

 

The top 20 global languages - defined in terms of their use as a first or second language - provide an interesting reflection on the fortunes of those languages that have spread by organic growth and those that have expanded by means of mergers and acquisitions. At the top of the league table is Mandarin Chinese, which has 1,052 million speakers, more than twice as many as the next highest, English, with 508 million. Third is Hindi with 487 million and fourth Spanish, with 417 million. Of course, English is a far more global language - though primarily as a second language - than Chinese, the vast majority of whose speakers live in China. But with the present rise of China - and indeed India - it would not be difficult to imagine Mandarin and Hindi becoming far more widely spoken by 2100. By way of contrast, French, which until the early 20th century was, with English, the global language of choice, albeit with rather more prestige, now lingers in ninth place in the table, with a mere 128 million speakers - little more than half the number of Bengali speakers, and just above Urdu.  

 

History teaches us that the future will always be shaped in large part by the unexpected and the unknowable: language is a classic case in point. Even the mightiest languages have fallen, and the future of the mightiest of our time - English - can never be secure or guaranteed, whatever the appearances to the contrary. Languages follow something like Darwin's law of evolution: they come and go, though their life spans vary enormously. Of the approximately 7,000 language communities in the world today, more than half have fewer than 5,000 speakers, and 1,000 fewer than a dozen: many will be extinct within a generation. But which languages, a millennium from now, will still be prospering, which will be the dominant global languages, and which will be the lingua franca? From our vantage point in the early 21st century, this remains entirely unpredictable.  

This is a great book. After reading it you will never think of language in the same way again - and you will probably think of the world, and its future, in a rather different way too.  

· Martin Jacques is visiting fellow at the LSE Asian Research Centre 

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,1435748,00.html  

Speak: A short history of languages by Tore Janson 

 

Like the old joke about London buses, you wait for ages and then three come along at once. This is suddenly the season for books on language development and change. This work covers some of the same ground as John McWhorter's book I reviewed last week and another book on a related theme will be reviewed next month.  

This one could not be more different in style to the last: it is as formal and European as John McWhorter's was informal and American (the author, Tore Janson, is a distinguished Swedish linguist who retired last year from his post as Professor of African Languages at Göteborg University). 

 

By formal, I don't mean incomprehensibly academic—Prof Janson writes in a clear, logical and accessible way. But he doesn't add the personal asides or pop-cultural references that John McWhorter does. He is also more cautious in his assessments and conclusions. Don't be deceived by the small format, the catchy title, or the attractive cover (with its detail from a picture by Manet)—this is a serious work, which will repay close attention. 

His canvas is language and history, in two facets: the history of language, and the effect of language on history. Early chapters cover prehistory; the grouping of languages into families; the invention of writing; the growth and influence of Greek and Latin; the development of the Romance languages (such as French, Occitan and Italian) from Latin after the end of the Roman Empire; the creation of English through cultural mixing and political changes; the reasons why the European national languages grew in importance in medieval and post-medieval times compared with Latin. 

That quick summary shows that the earlier and larger part is not a short history of languages in general, but of European languages. It's true that accidents of history, such as colonisation and trade, have given these languages—in particular English—an importance well above their geographical or cultural weight (the reasons why are explored in a later chapter). But in this respect, Tore Janson's book is narrower in focus than John McWhorter's. 

 

Two later chapters move into other areas. The first focuses on one way that new languages appear: through pidgins and creoles. The second looks at the cultural and political factors that cause them to vanish. The last two chapters show how it is that English has become so dominant, especially as a lingua franca, and what the language landscape might look like at various points in the future (though a writer has to be especially brave to feel able to say anything useful about a time two million years hence!). 

 

Within its comparatively limited geographical scope, this is a useful overview of the development and transformation of languages through cultural and political upheavals over time. 

[Tore Janson, Speak: A Short History of Languages, published by Oxford University Press in March 2002; pp301; ISBN 0-19-829978-8; publisher's prices: ?12.99, US$19.95, AU$49.95.] 

 

http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/re-spe1.htm  

The early history of indo-european languages by Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov Scientific American, March 1990, P.110 

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6507/chronicle120.html  

 

Annex 4

 

Pali

From: "The Light of Majjhimadesa" - Volume (1), U Chandramani Foundation, 2001

Source: http://www.rakhapura.com

Pali, in which only the Buddha delivered his noble messages, appears to have been hallowed as the text of the Buddhavacana. The language of the Buddhavacana is called Pali or Magadhi and sometimes Suddha-Magadhi, presumably in order to distinguish it from Ardha-Magadhi, the language of Jaina Canons. Magadhi means the language or dialect current in the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Magadha. In Pali Lexicon, the definition of Pali is given thus: 1 pa paleti, rakkhati ' ti pali. Since it preserves the Buddhavacana (words) in the form of the sacred text, it is called Pali. In fact, the word Pali signifies only "text" "sacred text". 2

 

According to the tradition current in Theravada Buddhist countries, Pali is Magadhi, Magadhanirutti, Magadhikabhasa, that is to say, the language of the region in which Buddhism had arisen. The Buddhistic tradition makes the further claim that the Pali Tipitaka is composed in the language used by the Buddha himself. 3 For this reason Magadhi is also called Mulabhasa 4 as the basic language in which the words of the Buddha were originally fixed. However, for Pali now arises the question, which region of India was the home of that language which was the basis of Pali.

 

Westergrd 5 and E.Kuhn 6 consider Pali to be the dialect of Ujjayini, because it stands closest to the language of the Asokan-inscriptions of Girnar (Guzerat), and also because the dialect of Ujjayini is said to have been the mother-tongue of Mahinda who preached Buddhism in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). R.O. Franke had a similar opinion by different means 7; and he finally reached the conclusion that the original home of Pali was "a territory, which could not have been too narrow, situated about the region from the middle to the Western Vindhya ranges". Thus it is not improbable that Ujjayini was the centre of its region of expansion. Sten Konow 8 too has decided in favour of the Vindhya region as the home of Pali.

 

 

Oldenberg (1879) 9 and E.Muller (1884) 10 consider the Kalinga country to be the home of Pali. Oldenberg thinks that Buddhism, and with it's the Tipitaka, was introduced into Ceylon rather in course of an intercourse between the island and the neighboring continent extending over a long period. However, E.MUller bases his conclusion on the observation that the oldest settlements in Ceylon could have been founded only by the people of Kalinga, the area on the mainland opposite Ceylon and not by people from Bengal and Bihar.

 

Maurice Winternitz 11 is of the opinion that Buddha himself spoke the dialect of his native province Kosala (Oudh) and it was most likely in this same dialect that he first began to proclaim his doctrine. Later on, however, he wandered and taught in Magadha (Bihar) he probably preached in the dialect of this province. When in course of time the doctrine spread over a large area, the monks of various districts preached each in his own dialect. It is probable that some monks coming from Brahmin circles also attempted to translate the speeches of Buddha into Sanskrit verses. However, the Buddha himself absolutely rejected it, and forbade learning his teachings in any other languages except Magadhi. Here it is related 12, how two Bhikkhus complained to the Master that the members of the order were of various origins, and that they distorted the words of the Buddha by their own dialect (Sakaya niruttiya). They, therefore, proposed that the words of the Buddha should be translated into Sanskrit verses (Chandaso). The Buddha, however, refused to grant the request and added:

Anujanamibhikkhave sakaya niruttiya buddhavacanam pariyapunitum. Rhys Davids and Oldenberg 13 translate this passage by "I allow you, oh brethren, to learn the words of the Buddha each in his own dialect". This interpretation, however, is not accorded with that of Buddhaghosa, according to whom it has to be translated by "I ordain the words of the Buddha to be learnt in his own language (i.e., in Magadhi, the language used by Buddha himself)". In fact, the explanation given by Buddhaghosa is more acceptable, because neither the two monks nor Buddha himself have thought of preaching in different dialects in different cases.

 

Magahi or Magadhi 14 is spoken in the districts of Patna, Gaya, Hazaribagh and also in the western part of Palamau, parts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur. On its eastern frontier Magahi meets Bengali. Dr.Grierson called the dialect of this region Eastern Magahi (Magadhi). He (Dr.Grierson) has named western Magadhi speeches as Bihari. In this time he includes three dialects, Magahi (Magadhi), Maithili and Bhojpuri. Dr.Grierson, after a comparative study of the grammars of the three dialects, had decided Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri as three forms of a single speech. There are four reasons for terming them as Bihari, viz.,

   1. Between Eastern Hindi and Bengali have certain characteristics, which are common to the three dialects.
   2. It becomes a provincial language like Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, etc.
   3. The name is appropriate from the historical point of view. Bihar was so named after so many Buddhist Viharas in the state. Ancient Bihar language was probably the language of early Buddhists and Jainas.
   4. It is not a fact that in Bihar there is no literature. In Maithili we have extant ancient literature. 

Though Hindi is highly respected as a literary language in Biharyetthe Maithili, Magahi and Bhojpuri languages are deeply entrenched in the emotions of the people. The fact is that Bihari is a speech distinct from Eastern Hindi and has to be classified with Bengali, Oriya and Assamese as they share common descent from Magadhi, Prakrit and Apabhransha. It is clear 15 that an uneducated and illiterate Bihari when he goes to Bengal begins to speak good Bengali with little effort but ordinarily it is not easy for an educated Bihari to speak correct Hindi. Dr.Grierson has inclined to decide that Magadhi was a dialect of Magadha (Bihar) and some parts of West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

 

The area covered by the Buddha's missionary activities included Bihar and Uttar Pradesh including the Nepal Tarai. So it may be assumed that the Buddha spoke in a dialect or dialects current in those regions. Welhelm Geiger 16 considers that Pali was indeed on pure Magadhi, but was yet a form of the popular speech which was based on Magadhi and which was used by Buddha himself. It may be imagined that the Buddha might choose a widespread language which was used or understood by common people in the region, because through which he could propagate his noble teachings to the common people. Thus, Pali or the dialect of Magadha was more probably the language of the common people and also a lingua franca of a large region including mainly Magadha (Bihar).

References

(1). Dhamma Annual - Vol. 19, No. 10-11 (June-1995).
(2). Cf. the expression iti pi pali, eg., th 2 co. 618, where pali=patho. Further, pali "sacred text" as distinct from attha katha, Dpvs.=20-20; Mhvs.=33-100; Sdhs. (Saddhammasamgaha, ed. by Saddhananda); Jpts. (Journal of the Pali Text Society) 1890, p. 535.
(3). Cf. Buddhaghosa: etha saka nirutti nama sammasambuddhena vuttappakaro magadhiko voharo, Comm. to Cullavagga V 33-1. see samantapasadika, ed. by Saya U Pye, IV416.(10)
(4). Sdhs. (Saddhammasamgaha, ed. by Saddhananda). Jpts. (Journal of the Pali Text Society) 1890, pp.55(23), 56(21), 57(19).
(5). Uber dem altesten Zeitram der indischen Geschi chte, p. 87.
(6). Beitr., p. 6ff. Cf. Mur, original Sanskrit texts, II, p. 356.
(7). Pali and Sanskrit, p. 131 ff. By Pali I, of course, always understand what has been called "Literary PAW' by Franke.
(8). The home of Paiuaci, ZDMG (Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenlandischen Desell-schaft).
(9). The Vinaya Pitaka I, London 1879, p. L ff.
(10). Simplified Grammar of the Pali language, London 1884, p. III.
(11). History of Indian Literature, Vol. II, p. 13.
(12). Cullavagga V. 33 1=Vin. II, 139.
(13). Vinaya Texts III=Sacred Books of the East, XX, p.151.
(14). The Comprehensive History of Bihar, Vol. I, Part I, p. 91, edited by Dr. Bindeshwari Prasad Sinha.
(15). Ibid. P. 89-90
(16). Pali Literature and Language, p. 6.
The Pali Language and Literature

From: Pali Text Society, http://www.palitext.com/ 

Pali is the name given to the language of the texts of Theravada Buddhism, although the commentarial tradition of the Theravadins states that the language of the canon is Magadhi, the language spoken by Gotama Buddha. The term Pali originally referred to a canonical text or passage rather than to a language and its current use is based on a misunderstanding which occurred several centuries ago. The language of the Theravadin canon is a version of a dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan, not Magadhi, created by the homogenisation of the dialects in which the teachings of the Buddha were orally recorded and transmitted. This became necessary as Buddhism was transmitted far beyond the area of its origin and as the Buddhist monastic order codified his teachings.

The tradition recorded in the ancient Sinhalese chronicles states that the Theravadin canon was written down in the first century B.C.E. The language of the canon continued to be influenced by commentators and grammarians and by the native languages of the countries in which Theravada Buddhism became established over many centuries. The oral transmission of the Pali canon continued for several centuries after the death of the Buddha, even after the texts were first preserved in writing. No single script was ever developed for the language of the canon; scribes used the scripts of their native languages to transcribe the texts. Although monasteries in South India are known to have been important centres of Buddhist learning in the early part of this millennium, no manuscripts from anywhere in India except Nepal have survived. Almost all the manuscripts available to scholars since the PTS (Pali Text Society) began can be dated to the 18th or 19th centuries C.E. and the textual traditions of the different Buddhist countries represented by these manuscripts show much evidence of interweaving. The pattern of recitation and validation of texts by councils of monks has continued into the 20th century.

The main division of the Pali canon as it exists today is threefold, although the Pali commentarial tradition refers to several different ways of classification. The three divisions are known as pi.takas and the canon itself as the Tipitaka; the significance of the term pitaka, literally "basket", is not clear. The text of the canon is divided, according to this system, into Vinaya (monastic rules), Suttas (discourses) and Abhidhamma (analysis of the teaching). The PTS edition of the Tipitaka contains fifty-six books (including indexes), and it cannot therefore be considered to be a homogenous entity, comparable to the Christian Bible or Muslim Koran. Although Buddhists refer to the Tipitaka as Buddha-vacana, "the word of the Buddha", there are texts within the canon either attributed to specific monks or related to an event post-dating the time of the Buddha or that can be shown to have been composed after that time. The first four nikayas (collections) of the Sutta-pitaka contain sermons in which the basic doctrines of the Buddha's teaching are expounded either briefly or in detail.

Buddhism: Language and Literature

Peter Friedlander

Source:  "Buddhist Studies - Lecture Notes", School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Australia, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/asianstudies/Buddha/index.html

Introduction

 

This is the last chapter on the pre-Mahayana in this book. It covers a period from around the 6th century BCE to the 2nd century CE. Within the scope of this chapter I will attempt to simply sketch out various key aspects of Buddhist language and literature over a period of eight centuries. This will be rather more an investigation of the issues raised by the these topics than a detailed study.

 

Language

 

Three key terms which we need to consider are Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit. We will also need to consider the terms Magadhi and Ardha-Magadhi. What does Sanskrit mean? It has a root meaning which does not actually refer to a language as such but to the concept of something being refined or purified. The term Sanskrit can be found in Buddhist texts used in the sense of meaning that which is refined as opposed to that which is natural which is called Prakrit. Likewise in Samkhya the principle of Prakriti is nature, hence Prakrit is that which is natural. So in a sense then Sanskrit does not refer to a language as such but to that which is refined or purified speech.

 

The languages in which the Vedas are written are not quite the same as classical Sanskrit which was standardised by Panini in about the 2nd century BCE. Despite the variations in the linguistic forms from the Rig Veda, which is considerably different from classical Sanskrit, the languages of the majority of Indian high cultural texts are all in forms of Sanskrit. Some of the later texts, such as the Puranas and the Epics are often not in very refined Sanskrit, but they are still in Sanskrit. Also from around the second century BCE onwards Buddhist texts began to be produced in Sanskrit. These texts are often in a kind of Sanskrit mixed with vernacular forms and which is often referred to as `Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit'. They are hybrid as they are a mix of Sanskrit and Prakrit. So you should bear in mind that the term Sanskrit does not simply refer to the classical standard form of the language but rather to a group of related language forms which share a common heritage in grammar, vocabulary and syntax.

 

In a similar manner the term Prakrit, which means `natural [speech]' refers to a group of language forms. Indeed Prakrits appear in Sanskrit texts. For instance, classical Sanskrit dramas, such as Kalidasa's `Little clay cart' include speeches by different characters in various forms of Prakrit. For instance, whereas the cook speaks in a `cook's Prakrit' and monkeys speak in a Prakrit appropriate for monkeys, the king the leading characters and the narrator speak in Sanskrit. This is similar to the modern linguistic situation in India where within a single environment or location a variety of language forms are spoken by different people. For instance in a monastery in Bodh Gaya, the cooks and workers will speak in varieties of local dialect, but the monks will speak in standard Hindi as well as their mother tongues, and the leading figures will also be able to converse in English. In other words the use of multiple languages according to social register is a common feature in South Asia.

There are also three other elements which need to be considered. First, there is the Dravidian element in the language situation in India. This term refers to a completely different language group nowadays spoken in the forms of Tamil, Malayalam, Telegu and Kannada in the Southern states of India. There is also an isolated pocket of the Dravidian languages in the Brahui language of modern Pakistan. This language group is based on a quite distinct vocabulary and grammar. Second, it should be noted, for completeness sake, that there are also a variety of `tribal' languages spoken in India which belong to various other language groups again. These include the languages of the tribal groups in Bihar, such as Santhali and Gond. Third there are also languages from distinct language groups spoken in the Himalayan and Burmese border regions of South Asia.

 

The situation at the time of the Buddha was probably very similar with a wide variety of languages being spoken in the area in which he lived. The dominant Prakrit language of his period in the area where he was active was called Magadhi, as is the present Hindi dialect of the area. This name is also preserved in the name given to the Prakrit of many of the Jaina scriptures. These were compiled from oral sources based on traditions active mainly in the Magadh area and the language of these scriptures is called `Adha-Magadhi', that is `Half-Magadhi'. It is a form of cleaned up Magadhi, half way between everyday speech and a `pure' language.

 

Language and meaning

 

The most important reason to consider any of this is that we need to consider how the Buddha would have addressed his audiences. He would have needed to speak in such a manner as would have been comprehensible to his audience. Clearly is a situation of such linguistic diversity he would have had to modulate his forms of speech according to the audience he was addressing. Speaking to a king and to a gang of street children, you need to speak in different ways.

 

Also we should consider that modern mass-education and media have been rapidly erasing the differences between dialects but that the situation in pre-modern cultures is one in which language forms vary considerably over short distances. There is a Hindi saying that after every three villages the language (that is the dialect) changes. So in that the Buddha was born on the Nepali border then his own language would not have been the same as that of Rajgir in Magadh or Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh. There are elements in the texts of the Pali canon which can be regarded as indicative of slight differences in language perhaps reflective of these ancient dialect differences.

 

Surely when the Buddha was addressing King Bimbasara he would have expressed himself in a different register than when he was addressing an ascetic who was visiting from another part of India, such as Bahiya who had come from Maharashtra to visit the Buddha. I would speculate that a skilled orator would express even the same notion to both audiences in different ways in order to get the teaching across as well as possible. If then you had been listening to both speeches you would have heard two versions of the same teaching. Were you then to be asked `which was the genuine teaching of the two' you would have had to say that both were genuine, although they were different in exact wording as they carried the same teaching.

 

The question of how to teach and the languages in which to teach is indeed addressed in the Pali canon. It is said that the Buddha was asked when teaching in different areas should the teachings be in a single language or adapted to the local language. The Buddha said that the teachings should be made in the language of the area. So disciples of the Buddha would have been teaching in a variety of languages according to the contexts in which they found themselves, so that people could understand them.

 

The Buddha is also said to have favoured natural language, Prakrit, over refined speech, Sanskrit, as the latter would not have been comprehensible to the general public. So what then is the relationship between Prakrit and Pali?

 

In a sense the term Pali, like Sanskrit, does not refer to a language at all. Richard Gombrich pointed out that it actually means `sacred scripture' and is a descriptive term for the Theravada scriptures and the language they are in. It is a standardised and consistent language based on earlier dialects. It is not exactly what the Buddha said, it is a standardised form of what the Buddha said. It is close to the Prakrit Magadhi languages that the Buddha probably spoke in, but it is not identical to them.

 

The Pali canon features long set phrases which are repeated countless times in identical terms. Such as the formulation of the Noble Truths and set descriptions like `he saluted the Buddha and sat down at one side of him'. These set doctrinal phrases and stock descriptive elements are, however, normally contextualised within passages which are each in a sense unique.

 

It seems to therefore be appropriate to point out that we have no way of knowing when the tradition of explaining the Pali canon with further commentorial material began. The textual traditions now extant always feature the main texts and subsidiary commentaries. It is known than that this tradition goes back in Sri Lanka to the time of the introduction of Buddhism, when it is said that commentaries explaining the texts were introduced along with the texts themselves. (I am using the term text here to refer to a spoken text, not a written text). This pattern of text and commentary is common in South Asian literature. It is also a feature of non-Buddhist Indian literature and a Sutra (Skt) or Sutta (Pali) means a `string' or `thread' and is the condensed essence of a text onto which a commentary should be stung.

 

The repetition of set phrases and material to contextualise and explain them is a feature which is typical of texts with commentaries. Part of the motivation for this is clearly that it is no good giving a teaching in a language nobody understands, it has to be accessible. Likewise even if the main teaching is linguistically comprehensible it will probably need an explanation to contextualise and make the meaning clear to the particular audience which is being addressed. Thus the issue of what constitutes `the speech of the Buddha' (Buddhavacana) is further complicated here by the possibility that we may have multiple versions of reported versions of what the Buddha said, all genuine, but all slightly different.

 

There is also an issue which is raised by a reference in the canon to two Brahmin brothers who had become monks and remembered the teachings and asked for permission to chant them in the manner of a Vedic chant. But the Buddha said that this was not appropriate. Despite this the Buddhist texts are chanted, but the manner and styles of their chanting do not conform to the Vedic patterns for the chanting of texts.

 

If we entertain the notion that the Pali texts are not the actual speech of the Buddha, but standardised versions of what he said, what then would be the relationship of the Sanskrit versions of the texts to the Pali versions? The Sanskrit versions are also standardised versions and would stand in similar relationship to the original utterances.

 

If we put aside the Theravada claim that the Pali texts are literal word of the Buddha then we have to consider this possibility. The existence of other Prakrit versions also seems to point to the same truth. None of the extant versions are simply `the literal words' of the Buddha, all textual traditions are, in one way or another, standardised versions of the words of the Buddha. The canon itself contains references to how it is important to understand the intended meaning of the text and not get caught up in the literal meaning.

In the present day the various Sanskrit and Prakrit versions of the canon are not all perfectly preserved. There are large sections of the canons of a number of Nikaya Buddhist traditions extant in their original language forms and, fortunately, more extensive translations of these texts into Chinese. Therefore it is possible to compare the Sanskrit, Prakit and Pali versions of some texts.

 

An instance of this is the Dhammapada. This is available in Pali, Sanskrit, two Prakrits, Chinese and Tibetan translations. The various traditions do not have exactly the same text. The number of verses vary, the order of the verses vary and the texts of the verses vary and to some extent even the meaning of individual verses vary.

The common endeavour behind all of this was clearly a constant effort by different people in diverse locations to keep the Buddha's teachings comprehensible. For some people it seemed that Pali was the best, for some Prakrits, for some a widely know standard language, Sanskrit, seemed the most appropriate. For some it was necessary to translate the texts into totally new languages, such as Chinese. In the article by (I have forgotten his name) on the translation of the Lotus Sutra into Chinese there is a fine description of this translation process. It needed one or more Indian Pandits and one or more central Asian and Chinese Pandits who would sit together. The India Pandit reads out the text to the Chinese Pandit who writes it down and then it is compared for meaning by the various people involved. In the particular case that was being studied in this article it is argued that although the text is described as being in Sanskrit, the Indian Pandit was apparently reading it out in Prakrit based on the evidence of the kinds of mistakes that were being made in translation. So this suggests that not only do we need to consider the languages of the written forms of the texts but of the spoken forms of exposition which were employed. We must remember then that the text consists of the text, the expounder and the listener.

 

Linguistic change and the Growth of Buddhism

 

One other point about the linguistic changes in the growth of the canon. It seems to reflect to some extent the geographical spread of Buddhism. By the second century CE Buddhism had spread throughout South Asia and into Central Asia and China. Therefore the issue of how to give the teachings must have been of prime concern in the Buddhist world. The common consensus was clearly that the texts needed to be translated into languages appropriate for the peoples of the areas in which Buddhism was active. But at the same time there is of course the overarching need to maintain the meaning of the teachings while the form of expression varies. Within the North Indian linguistic area is was possible to maintain key terms in forms which were commonly employed, sukha, dukkha, dharma, karma, nirvana, samsara, etc.

 

But, once the texts started being translated into Chinese a new set of problems was apparent. Just as terms such as dharma, nirvana, samsara present problems for translation into English, so to is there a problem when translating such terms into Chinese. There was, for instance, no common view of reincarnation samsara as a given truth in Chinese.

 

Interestingly enough the first school of Chinese translation, the old school, translated by finding the most similar Chinese terms available for Indic terms, normally finding terms from Taoism that were equivalent. Thus the Buddha became a teacher of the Tao rather than the dharma. This translation approach was standard from the beginnings in the 1st/2nd century CE up to around the 5th century. At this point the translators revised their views and retranslated the texts again using Chinese equivalent versions of the Indic terms rather than Taoist equivalents.

 

Buddhist literature

 

So was the canon of the Nikaya Buddhist traditions exactly the same for all the traditions? I have indicated above that in the case of the Dhammapada there were variations between the different traditions. Variations in the number of verses and verses that are common to all traditions and unique to individual traditions. You cannot simply say that one version is the original version, yet it is desirable to consider how the versions related to each other. It is likely that non of the extant versions are the original version as oral traditions are often more fluid than textual traditions. So rather than saying that any one textual version it might be better to propose that all the versions are but windows onto an earlier oral tradition. There are in the case of other texts instances where the Pali versions of texts seem more developed than other versions. For instance the Pali Mahaparinibbana sutta seems more complex than the version translated into Chinese from the Sanskrit Sarvastivada tradition. The latter having a more simple description of the funeral rites and the former a more elaborate version.

 

Nikaya literature: vinaya, sutta, and abhidharma pitakas

 

There are basically three parts of the Nikaya Buddhist canon. The Sutta pitaka, the Vinaya pitaka and the Abhidhamma pitaka. The Sutta pitaka is fairly consistent in some parts over the various versions, in particular the Digha and Majjima, Anguttara and Samyakta Nikayas are fairly consistent in their contents, if not in the exact forms of the texts.

 

However the next Nikaya, Khuddaka Nikaya which in the Pali version contains 14 texts has a much greater variation in its contents. It includes the Khuddaka Pattha, a sort of early version of a collection of the chants for daily recitation and the Dhammapada, which I have already noted has considerable variations between the various versions. The next text is the Udana, which at least in the Sarva stiva da version is similar to the name given to the Dhammapada which is called the Udanavarga. There is also the Itivuttika further sayings of the Buddha and the jatakas. The number of the jatakas also varies from tradition to tradition. There are also instances of completely different works being included in this part of the canon by different traditions.

 

The Sarvastivada tradition included a text called the Mahavastu in the canon, a kind of life of the Buddha, but the Theravada tradition does not include this text. While the Theravada tradition included the Vimanavattu and the Pettavatu in its canon, tales on the good and bad results of giving or not giving to the samgha. These last two texts are regarded as very late by scholars. So to are the following texts called the Buddhavamsa, an account of the previous 24 Buddhas and the Cariya-pitaka which is an account of how the Buddha manifested the ten perfections in his previous lives as a Bodhisattva. The very fact that the title of the last includes the term pitaka in its title, which is a term that means basket or winnowing fan suggest that it must have come from a time when the canon could be put into baskets, clearly only possible once it had been written down.

 

The Pali canon was first written down in the first century BCE in Sri Lanka according to Sri Lankan sources. The traditional explanation of this is that it was due to fear of parts of the canon getting lost that led to it being written down. It is said that during a famine there was only a only a single monk left alive who knew one section of it and this was the cause of it being set down in writing. You may think it was odd that it was not previously written down, but there seems to have been a reluctance to write things down in ancient India.

 

To return to the contents of the canon the next part is the Vinaya pitaka which includes details on how the monks and nuns should live and stories to explain the rules of the monastic code. Even in the fifth century CE when Chinese pilgrims were visiting India and trying to get copies of the Vinaya they found it quite difficult as in many places it existed only in the form of oral tradition. The reluctance to commit to writing parts of the canon seems to have been a long standing aspect of the tradition in India. People simply preferred to remember the whole thing. It was indeed one specialisation that monks could have was to memorise entire parts of the canon, and memorisation of the Vinaya pitaka was apparently a common phenomena.

 

The last part of the canon is the Abhidhamma pitaka, a philosophical study of the Buddha's teachings. This contains seven works in the Theravada version. In the Sarva stiva da version the number and nature of the works was somewhat different. Certain parts show evidences of having been based on similar earlier traditions, others are clearly distinctive contributions of the various schools. It is not clear if all schools had their own Abhidhamma pitaka traditions or they were shared in common by various traditions. The main Abhidhamma pitaka traditions seem to have been those of the Theravada and the Sarva stiva da traditions.

 

The different Abhidhamma pitaka traditions are acknowledged to be later parts of the canon which were not in existence at the time of the first council and they post date the Sutta and Vinaya pitakas. There are considerable variations between the different philosophical traditions. The Theravada tradition held that there were only four realities rupa, citta, cetasaka and Nibbana, whereas the Sarva stiva da tradition held that there were five realities and included space a ka sa as a fifth reality. Also whilst the Theravada tradition held that only the present moment `existed' when things were perceived, the Sarva stiva da tradition held that things `existed' in the past, present and future. This last view accounts for the name of the tradition which means `all exists'. Due to this it is natural that the philosophical texts vary in their contents. Despite sharing a common interest in philosophical analysis. Indeed the differences between the traditions form the basis for a Theravada tradition text, the Katthavattu or `Points of controversy' which outlines the differences between the traditions as seen from a Theravada viewpoint.

 

A point of note in this is that in the Katthavattu the philosophical position on the possibility of transferring merit to deceased relatives of the Theravada tradition is put as that it is impossible in distinction from that of the other schools which say that it is possible. But, this viewpoint also conflicts with the views expressed in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Theravada canon itself, in which the transfer of merit is clearly regarded as possible. A further twist to this issue is that in the later text called Milanda Panha a compromise is suggested that merit can be transferred to some classes of preta, and this is the current view of most Theravada tradition followers.

 

Nikaya and Mahayana literature

 

There is a further question which is worth addressing here is. `What parts of the Nikaya Buddhist canon are also accepted by Mahayana Buddhist traditions?' Interestingly enough though the question becomes not really what are accepted texts, so much as what are texts that interest different traditions. The Sutta texts for instance are accepted as genuine by the Mahayana tradition, but they are of little interest to the Mahayana it seems. However, almost all the traditions agree on the importance of the Dhammapada as the essence of the Buddha's teachings.

 

The Vinaya pitaka is also a commonly held part of the early canon. Although that majority of East Asian and Himalayan traditions follow the Sarva stiva da Vinaya rather than the Theravada Vinaya, however there are in theory no major differences. This is of course quite separate from the question of how the Vinaya is interpreted which evidently varies widely between the Northern and Southern traditions.

 

The Abhidhamma contains almost no texts which are common between Nikaya Buddhists, let alone between the Nikaya Buddhists and the Mahayana Buddhists. However, there is a similar fascination with philosophy in all the traditions.

 

It is also vital to realise that there is much in Theravada tradition which is unique to it and not held in common with other Nikaya Buddhist traditions. The great synthesis of teachings in the Visuddhimagga, `The Path of Purification' by Buddhaghosa which was composed in the 5th century CE is distinctly Theravada in its viewpoint. It was based on a translation into Pali of the existing Singhalese commentaries on the canon and records traditions which may well go back in origin to India but had undergone centuries of evolution in Sri Lanka. Buddhaghosa himself was from North India, from near Bodh Gaya and went to Sri Lanka to translate their vernacular commentaries into Pali.

 

The famous Sri Lankan chronicles, such as the Mahavamsa are also distinctly Sri Lankan Theravada creations that link the history of Buddhism to that of the ruling dynasties of Sri Lanka.

There was also a continuous tradition of creating new Pali texts in South East Asia, in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos. It is interesting to note that in this case the argument for Pali as the sacred language has completely altered. The early argument for Pali it seems was, as suggested above, that it was comprehensible to the people as it was close to everyday speech. Evidently in Sri Lanka and South East Asia this was not the case. Rather it was seen as being the authentic language of the Buddha. In a sense then it has become a kind of purified language whose function is akin to that of Sanskrit in India, a kind of sacred lingua franca comprehensible over a wide area and felt to be the essence of refinement and imbued with great power and sophistication.

 

The Earliest Buddhist Manuscripts

 

Finally, as an epilogue let us consider the case of the earliest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered. A few years ago the British Library in London was approached to find out if it was interested in acquiring what appeared to be some old manuscripts which had emerged from war torn Afghanistan. These were a collection of rolled up birch bark manuscripts. These are very difficult materials to deal with as they normally crumble into dust as you touch them. In this case they were stored in urns and they were purchased in the urns. The library spent a year and a half gradually humidifying and unrolling the manuscripts a millimetre at a time and ended up with fragile sheets of birch bark sandwiched between perspex sheets. It should be born in mind that birch bark is a bit like vellum, as long as its kept in normal conditions it is pliable and an excellent writing surface, it only become so crumbly if left to dry out in an arid environment for two thousand years. These were then photographed and digitised. They are a very exciting discovery as it has become apparent that they date from around the first century CE. They are written in a dialect of Prakrit in a script called Kharoshti, and the number of scholars it is said who can read this script are said to be merely a handful. The Kharoshti script was popular in the North Western part of India and dropped out of use by the time of the Islamic invasions of India. The group of scholars who are working on these manuscripts are still working on deciphering them.

 

The initial reports indicate that they are all fragments of works. This turns out to be because they are fragments of old manuscripts which had been re-copied and the old manuscripts were interred in an urn and buried as if they the body of the Buddha. This in itself is fascinating as it shows that the Buddhists buried their old manuscripts, Hindu's also treat their manuscripts like their dead and prefer to ideally place them into rivers as they do the ashes of bodies.

 

The contents of the manuscripts include sections from Dhammapada, the rhinoceros verses, and verses in praise of the lake now known as Manasarover by Mount Kailash, known in Buddhist literature as lake Anavatapta. There also indications that they productions of the Dhammaguptika tradition. They contain no parts of the Vinaya or Abhidhamma pitakas and appear to be all drawn from the Sutta pitaka. However, we are still waiting for further detailed reports on their contents.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion then it is clear that the breadth and depth of Buddhist literature is hard to comprehend. Even were you to become a master of the Theravada Tipitaka you would still not have read the greater part of the literature of the other Nikaya Buddhist traditions. Also to be able to do a good comparative study of this literature in real depth you would need to know not just Pali, Prakrit and Sanskrit, but also to access the translations of the parts of the Nikaya Buddhist canons lost in Indic languages you need to learn Chinese to read these portions in translation. This is as they say in Australia `a big ask', however, beginning to map out the dimensions of this issue is the first step on the road to the study of Nikaya Buddhist literature.

The Pali Language

Source: http://www.buddhamind.info

A question often asked is: "Did the Buddha speak Pali?" If so, how much of the original language has been retained? If not, how much has translation affected the accurate transmission of the teachings? There seems to be no one answer to these questions but I offer the following as the results of my investigation.

The paramount power in India for two centuries, spanning both before and after the Buddha, was the Kingdom of Kosala, of which the Buddha's birth kingdom, Magadha, was a fiefdom. Magadhi seems to be a dialect of Kosalan, and there is some evidence that this was the language that the Buddha spoke. The Pali of the Canon seems to be based on the standard Kosalan as spoken in the 6th and 7th centuries BC. The script used on the rock edicts of Asoka is a younger form of this standard. On one of the Asoka pillars (about 300 BC) there is a list of named Suttas which can be linguistically placed within the Singhalese Canon.

 

Sanskrit was also widely spoken and warrants discussion. It seems to have been the language of the Brahmin's, the 'spiritual' class. It is etymologically older than Pali but, as regards texts and inscriptions, the native tongue (Kosalan) was the more common or popular medium. In the Text we see the Buddha encouraging his disciples to teach in the popular language of any area. However after the Buddha's death, what were considered more 'learned' forms were gradually made use of, despite the fact that these gave a less faithful picture of the living speech. Slowly the efforts to represent the real facts of the spoken language gave way to another effort, the expression of learned phraseology, until roughly 300 AD, classical Sanskrit became used exclusively in relation to Buddhism. This trend is reflected in the scripture of later Buddhist traditions.

 

The use of Pali is practically confined to Buddhist subjects, and then only in the Theravada school. It's exact origin is the subject of much learned debate and from the point of view of the non-specialist, we can think of it as a kind of simplified, common man's Sanskrit. The source of the Pali Text we have lies in the North of India. It is definitely not Singhalese in origin as it contains no mention of any place in Sri Lanka, or even South India. The similes abounding in the Singhalese literature are those of a sub-tropical climate and of a great river valley rather than those of a tropical island.

 

Being an essentially oral language, lacking a strong literary base of its own, it adopted the written script of each country it settled in. It is clear that by the time the Text arrived in Sri Lanka, with Asoka's son Mahinda, about 240 BC, it was considered closed.

 

Conclusion:

Any historical study is much like a jigsaw puzzle. Piecing together information from a scrap of parchment here, a clay tablet there; comparing various bits of antiquity, the opinions and insights of others; analysing and evaluating - and then - coming to a conclusion. The more Buddhist history books I studied, to try and determine precise information, the more opinions I ended up collecting. History, it seems, can be very much a matter of opinion.

 

Very few undisputed facts exist by which to prove the authenticity of the Pali Canon. Even the dates of the Buddha are questionable. The earliest reliable dates in Indian history that we have are those for Emperor Asoka's rule; 274 - 236 BC. We can also be relatively certain that the Text remained unchanged from the time it was written down, about 80 BC.

 

As regards the reliability of the Text I felt two items to be of greatest importance.

 

* Firstly: The reason that anything survives the rigours of more than 2000 years of history is that it is considered to be of great value. Presumably the reason for this evaluation was that the teaching was seen to work, i.e. to lead to the transcendence of suffering. Such a known treasure would have been well guarded and part of this protection would have been a tremendous concern for retaining the 'jewel' in its entirety, i.e. accurately.

 

* Secondly: After several centuries of travelling to many different lands and being translated into different languages, the disparity between the various renderings of the main Text existing today in Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan is typically greatest in matters of least importance. Only very rarely are differences founded on doctrinal matters. It can be seen that these works are clearly not independent compositions, being very similar in their substantive content. This "authenticity by comparison" is an important item in support of scriptural accuracy. More specifically, the Vinaya is almost without exception, identical in every Buddhist tradition.

 

On a more general note:

 

I feel that the majority of us who have come to give the Text some consideration, originally set out in search of a guide by which to find a way to resolve the root-problem of our personal existence. The process of production warrants investigation but surely the true test of any guide book is its ability to lead one to the desired destination. The whole energy behind the Buddha's teaching was the ending of suffering. If what you glean from the Text eases or ends your suffering then the teaching has been accurately transmitted. What is of greatest importance is to take the teachings that seem relevant, that feel applicable to your life, and to make them a personal reality, to turn the theory into practice.

Thanks to U Razinda Dept. of Ancient Indian & Asian Studies, Nalanda, India for his compilation of these internet resources, titled, `Home of Pali'. http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebsut059.htm

See also, resources listed at: http://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebidx.htm

(*) How old is the Suttapitaka? The relative value of textual and epigraphical sources for the study of early Indian Buddhism. Alexander Wynne.

(*) The Advent of Pali Literature in Thailand. Ven. H. Saddhatissa.

 

Samskrtam and Vedic evidences for language evolution

 

Indian tradition in science and technology – MD Srinivas 

Excerpts and notes:

This adds to my contention that panini's grammar was the greatest invention of a single human mind in the history of mankind. there is much more to language than just communication. it is science, and nowhere has language evolved more than in india. the very system of the generation of consonant phoneme -- based on adding 5 variants such sibilant, epiglottal etc. to the basic ka, cha, ta, tha, pa sounds -- is itself a remarkable invention. compare indian alphabets -- totally systematic -- to say, english -- totally random. (see also the remarkable conjecture that mendeleev's periodic table ideas were an insight based on his familiarity with the recurring patterns of the letters in the devanagari -- and most other indian -- scripts. no wonder he talked about eka-silicon, dva-germanium, etc, as he knew samskrtam).

the 'reductionist' approach of euro-science, and the vanity that everything can be understood by reducing it down to smaller and smaller components, is now under challenge by the scholars asserting the 'emergent' principle of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

the indian approach -- it may be characterized as categorization and deductive/inductive reasoning from first principles/observation -- does not fall into the trap of mechanistic thinking.

Any study of the Indian tradition of science has to start with linguistics. This is true not only because linguistics is the earliest
of Indian sciences to have been rigorougly systematized but also because this systematization became the paradigm example for all other sciences.

Like all sciences and arts in India, linguistics finds its first expression in the Vedas. For most of the Indian sciences, the elements
of study and the categories of analysis were established in the Vaidika period, and the basic data was collected and preliminary
systematization achieved simultaneously. Thus for the science of linguistics, we find, in the siksha and pratisakhya texts associated with the various Vedas, a complete and settled list of phonemes appropriately classified into vowels, semi-vowels, sibilants and the five groups of five consonants, all arranged according to the place of articulation that moves systematically from the throat to the lips.

Phonetics and phonology are, therefore, taken for granted by all post-Vaidika authorities on etymology (nirukta) and grammar
(vyakarana), including Yaska and Panini. In the pratisakhya literature we also find the morpho-phonemic (sandhi) rules and much of the methodology basic to the later grammatical literature.

Indian linguistics finds its rigorous systematization in Panini's Ashtadhyayi. The date of this text, like that of much of the early
Indian literature, is yet to be settled with certainty. But it is not later than 500 BC. In Ashtadhyayi, Panini achieves a complete
characterization of the Sanskrit language as spoken at his time, and also specifies the way it deviated from the Sanskrit of the Vedas. Using the sutras of Panini and a list of the root words of the Sanskrit language (dhatupatha), it is possible to generate all
possible valid utterances in Sanskrit. This is of course the main thrust of the generative grammars of today that seek to achieve a
grammatical description of language through a formalized set of derivational strings. In fact, till the western scholars began
studying generative grammars in the recent past, they failed to understand the significance of Ashtadhyayi: till then Paninian sutras for them were merely artificial and abstruse formulations with little content.

Patanjali (prior to the first century BC) in his elaborate commentary on Ashtadhyayi, Mahabhashya, explains the rationale for the Paninian exercise. According to Mahabhashya, the purpose of grammar is to give an exposition of all valid utterances. An obvious way to do this is to enumerate all valid utterances individually. This is how the celestial teacher Brihaspati would have taught the science of language to the celestial student, Indra. However for ordinary mortals, not having access to celestial intelligence and time, such complete enumeration is of little use. Therefore, it is necessary to lay down widely applicable general rules (Utsarga sutras) so that with a comparatively small effort men can learn larger and larger collections of valid utterances. What fails to fit in this set of general rules should, according to the Mahabhashya, then be encompassed in exceptional rules
(apavada sutras), and so on. In thus characterizing grammar, Patanjali expounds perhaps the most essential feature of the Indian scientific effort.

Science in India starts with the assumption that truth resides in the real world with all its diversity and complexity. For the linguist, what is ultimately true is the language as spoken by the people in all their diverse expressions. As Patanjali emphasizes, valid utterances are not manufactured by the linguist but are already established in the practice in the world. One does not go to a linguist asking for valid utterances, the way one goes to a potter asking for pots.

Linguists make generalizations about the language spoken. These generalizations are not the truth behind or above the reality of the spoken language. These are not idealizations according to which reality is to be tailored. On the other hand what is true is what is actually spoken in the real workd, and some part of the truth always escapes our idealization of it. There are always exceptions. It is the business of the scientist to formulate these generalizations, but also at the same time to be always attuned to the reality, to always be conscious of the exceptional nature of each specific instance. This attitude, as we shall have occasion to see, permeates all Indian science and makes it an exercise quite different from the scientific enterprise of the West.

In Lingusitcs, after the period of Mahabhashya, grammarians tried to provide continuous refinements and simplifications of Panini. Several Sanskrit grammar texts were written. One of them, Siddhanta Kaumudi (c. 1600) became eminently successful, because of its simplicity. These attempts continued till the 19th century. Another form of study that became popular among the grammarians was what may be called philosophical semantics, where grammarians tried to fix and characterize the meaning of an utterance by analyzing it into its basic grammatical components. This, of course, is the major application for which grammar is intended in the first place.

Grammars for other Indian languages were written, using Paninian framework as the basis. These grammars were not fuly formalized in the sense of Panini. Instead, they started with the Paninian apparatus and specified the transfer rules from Sanskrit and the specific morpho-phonemic rules (sandhi rules) for the language under consideration. Such grammars for various Prakrit languages of the North and also the South Indian languages continued to be written until the 18th century. In the 16th century, Krishnadasa even wrote a grammar for the Persian language, Parasi Prakasha, styled on the grammars of the Prakrit language.

[From MD Srinivas, 2005, The Indian tradition in science and technology: an overview, in: P. Parameswaran, ed., National Resurgence in India, Thiruvananthapuram, Bharatheeya Vichara Kendram, pp. 52-62.]

http://rajeev2004.blogspot.com/2005/07/md-srinivas-indian-tradition-in.html

 

Appendix 5

 

Bharatiya tradition: Linguistic Studies and Religion


(HinduDharma: Vyakarana

 

 

Siksa, Vyakarna and the subjects I have yet to deal with -Chandas and Nirukta-are Vedangas-(limbs of the vedas)connected with language. After I said that I would deal with matters basic to our religion, I have been speaking about linguistic studies and grammar. Next I am going to deal with prosody. By works on religion we ordinarily mean those[directly] relating to God, worship, devotion, jnana, dharma and so on. Would not the right thing for me then be to speak about such works?  

 

When we dealt with the vedas a number of matters cropped up, matters regarded as germane to religion. Religion will find a prominent place in the subjects that I have yet to speak about, Kalpa, Mimamsa, the Puranas and Dharmasastra., But in between has arisen the science of language that has apparently no connection with religion.  

 

In the vedic view everything is connected with the Lord. There is no question of dividing subjects into "religious" and "non-religious". Even the science of medicine, Ayurveda, which pertains to physical well being, is ultimately meant for Atmic uplift- or for that matter, military science(Dhanurveda). That is why they were made part of traditional lore. So too political economy which is also an Atma-sastra.  

 

Why are works belonging to these fields held in great esteem? All subjects, all works, that teach a man to bring order, refinement and purity in every aspect of his life and help him thus to take the path to liberation are regarded as religious in character.  

 

Sound is the highest of the perceived forms of the Paramatman and language is obviously connected with it. It is the concern of Siksa and Vyakarana to refine and clarify it and make it a means for the well-being of our Self.  

Grammar is associated with Sabdabrahman. Worship of the Nadabrahman which is the goal of music is a branch of this. If sounds are well discerned and employed in speech they will serve not only the purpose of communication but also of cleansing us inwardly. The science of language is helpful here.  

 

I have already mentioned that Pathanjali's commentary on Panini's Sutras is called the Mahabhasya. The prefix "Maha" in the name of the work is an indication of high degree of importance given to grammar in our tradition. Illustrious teachers have written commentaries on the Vedas, on the Brahmasutra, on the Upanisads, on the Bhagavadgita, and so on. But none of these has "maha" prefixed to it. There is a saying that a scholar derives as much happiness from learning the Mahabhasya as from ruling an empire.  

 

Mahabhasyam va pathaniyam 

maharajyam va sasaniyam  

 

I recently came across another piece of evidence like the Vengi inscription to prove how in the old days our rulers nurtured and propagated the science of grammar.  

 

Dhar was a state in the formal Central Provinces(now a part of Madhya Pradesh). It is the same as Dhara which was the capital of Bhojaraja who was a great patron of arts and who made lavish gifts to poets and artists. There is a mosque in the town of Dhar now. Once a cave was discovered in the mosque which on examination revealed some writings in Sanskrit. But the department of epigraphy could not carry out any investigations until some years after freedom. Then, with the permission of the authorities of the mosque, they studied their finding.  

To their amazement they saw a wheel inside with verses dealing with grammar inscribed on it in the form of a chart. The mosque stands today where a temple to Sarasvati stood during Bhojaraja's time. The idea behind the wheel is that the science of language (grammar)must form part of the temple to Sarasvati, the goddess of speech---and grammar is the Vedapurusa's mouth. They say that grammar could be learnt at a glance from this wheel. It is because the science of language is worthy of worship that the wheel inscribed with grammar was installed in the temple. With the blessings of Vagdevi(Sarasvati) we have obtained the wheel, though long after the mosque was built at that site. The department of epigraphy has published the text of the inscription with an English translation.  

 

We learn thus that sastras like grammar were not regarded merely as of worldly interest but in fact considered worthy of worship. That is why rulers promoted them.  

 
It is inscribed and the inscriptiopn mentions it  as the auspicious and merit-bestowing image of Vagdevi, the repository of learning of the city of Bhoja, the moon among   kings  prepared by Manathala the son of the architect sculptor Sahira and engraved by Sivadeva in Samvat 1091 (1035 A.D.} There is an interesting inscription on the pedestal of the image.   It is a dedicatory verse  in  the " Sardula Vikridita metre, dated Samvat 1091 ( A. D. 1035 } recording the installation of the image   of  Vag-devi, the goddess of learning and the arts, by somebody in the  reign   of  king Bhoja, evidently Bhoja Paramara of Malwa, who reigned from A. D. 1018 - 60 .
http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/ixbin/goto?id=OBJ5974 Marble relief figure of Sarasvati

 

From Malwa, central India, early 11th century AD

 

A Jain goddess of knowledge

http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/resources/image/medium/ps185355.jpg

 

 

 

Although she is better known as a Hindu goddess, Sarasvati's cult is equally popular among the Jains. Sarasvati is a benign goddess associated with knowledge, music and learning. Originally associated with the river Sarasvati, this goddess now has the epithet, 'Vina-pustak dharini' or bearer of the musical instrument ( vina), and a book. The latter is visible in her lower left hand, and she probably also held her other representative feature, a lotus, in one of her hands. She can is often also shown on her mount, the swan. Since knowledge ( jnana) plays a fundamental role in Jain religion as a means to salvation, this goddess has an important place in their pantheon. She features frequently in the vast Jain libraries filled with painted manuscripts that have been found in Western India.

Although a relief, the main image has been very deeply cut, and looks three-dimensional. Sarasvati stands in an architectural frame, the arch over her head bearing three small enshrined tirthankaras. Two more tirthankaras can be seen flanking the image level with her hips. Other attendant figures, and perhaps the patrons can be seen in the lowest register of the framing arch. The inscriptin on the base gives the name and family of the donor.

 

 

 

Height: 66.1 cm

 

 

 

 

OA 1880-349

 
Room 33, China, South & South-east Asia, India case 19

 

 

 

Sanskrit : The Universal Language
(HinduDharma: Vyakarana) 

 

Sanskrit is the language of all mankind; it is an international language and also the language of the gods. The gods are called "girvanas"; so Sanskrit is called "Gairvani". While the emperor of Tamil poetry, Kambar, describes it as the "devabhasa", the Sanskrit poet Dandin calls it " daivi vak"(divine speech) in his Kavyadarsa: " Samskrtam nama daivi vak. " 

 

Sanskrit has no syllable that indistinct or unclear. Take the English "word". It has neither a distinct "e-kara" nor "o-kara". There are no such words in Sanskrit. Neither is the "r" in "word" pronounced distinctly nor is it silent.  

Sanskrit, besides, has no word that cannot be traced to its root. Whatever the word it can be broken into its syllables to elucidate its meaning. Sanskrit is sonorous and auspicious to listen to. You must not be ill disposed towards such a language, taking the narrow that it belongs to a few people.  

 

To speak Sanskrit is not to make some noises and somehow convey your message. The sounds, the phonemes, in it are, as it were, purified and the words and sentences refined by being subjected to analysis. That is why the language is called "Sanskrit"[Samskrtam]. The purpose of Siksa, and in greater measure of Vyakarana, is to accomplish such refinement.  

 

To speak the language of Sanskrit itself means to be refined, to be cultured. As the language of the gods it brings divine grace. The sounds of Sanskrit create beneficial vibrations of the nadis and strengthen the nervous system, thereby contributing to our health.  

 

Mouth of the Vedapurusa
(HinduDharma: Vyakarana) 

 

Vyakarana or grammar is the "mukha" of the Vedapurusa, his mouth. The Tamil word for grammar is "illakanam". Grammar deals with the "laksanas" of a language. "Laksmana(n)" is "llukkumanan" in Tamil. In the same way, "laksana(m)" becomes "illakanam" in that language.  

 

There are a number of works on Sanskrit grammar. The most widely used and important is the one by the great sage Panini. There is a gloss - a vartika- on his "Vyakarna-sutra" by Vararuci. Patanjali has written a bhasya or commentary on Panini's sutras. These three are the chief works on Sanskrit grammar.  

 

There is a difference between grammar and other sastras. In the case of other subjects the original sutras constituting them are esteemed more than their bhasyas. But, in the case of grammar, or Vyakarana, the Vartika is more valued than the sutras and still more valued is the bhasya.  

 

According to one reckoning, there are six sastras. Vyakarana is one of them. Four of the sastras are particularly important :apart from Vyakarana, Tarka(logic), Mimamsa and Vedanta. Vyakarna is also one of the vedic sadanga( six limbs of the vedas ).  

 

"Sucant sutram ", so it is said. (The sutra is just an indication of something, a truth or a principle. ) Every sastra has a bhasya and each such bhasya is known by a particular name. The vyakarana bhasya (of Patanjali) alone is called "Mahabhasya", "the great commentary ". 

 

Sanskrit and Tamil Grammar
(HinduDharma: Vyakarana) 

 

Just as "illakanam", the Tamil word for grammar, is derived from the Sanskrit "laksana", so too a number of other words that have to do with grammar in that language are of Sanskrit origin. For instance, there are two terms used in Tamil grammar, pakuti (pahuti) and vikuti (vihuti). To illustrate in the word "Ramanukku" (for Raman ), "Raman " is pakuti and "ku" is "vikuti". Both terms pakuti and vikuti are derived from Sanskrit grammar. "How do you say so? " it might be asked. "Is it not pakuti an original tamil word derived from "pakuttal? " 

 

Pakuti in the sense of that which has been divided is indeed a Tamil word. But I say that there is another pakuti that is a corrupt form of the Sanskrit "prakarti". It is in the sense of "prakarti" that the word "Raman" in "Ramanukku" is described as pakuti. As for "vikuti" it is from the Sanskrit "vikriti": there is no such word as "vikuttal" in Tamil corresponding to pakuttal. From the undisputed fact that vikuti is from vikriti, we may conclude for certain that pakuti is from prakrti.  

 

(Vikrti also called "pratyaya", that which gives many meanings to the same prakrti. When it is said "Ramanai aditten"-(I) beat Raman-the pratyaya "ai" added makes Raman the person who is beaten. If it is said Ramanal adipatten-(I) was beaten by Raman-the prakrti Raman with the al makes him the one who beat. ) 

It is not my purpose to claim that Sanskrit is superior to Tamil. When do feelings of superiority arise to make us happy? When we are conscious of differences between what we believe is "ours" and what we believe is "theirs". Where we to have racial bias, we could be tempted to speak in appreciative terms of what is "ours" and to deprecate what is "theirs". If we realise that to harbour feelings based on racial differences is itself wrong, that our languages have sprung from the same family, from the same cultural tradition, there will be no cause for speaking highly of one language at the expense of another.  

 

On the subject of grammar I have mentioned certain facts and it is not my intention to elevate one language above another.  

 

Grammar and Siva
(HinduDharma: Vyakarana) 

 

Siva temples have a mandapa (pavilion or hall) called " vyakarana-danamandapa". In Tamil it has come to be called " vakkanikkum mandapam". There are such halls in many temples in the Chola territory of Tamilnadu. One such is in Tiruvorriyur near Madras. Why should there be a mandapa for grammar in Siva temples? What is Siva's connection with language? Is not Siva in his form of Daksinamurti all silence?  

 

Nrttavasane Nataraja-rajo nanada dhakkam navapancavaram 

Uddhartukamah Sankadisiddhanetadvimarse Sivasutrajalam 

 

I will speak briefly about this stanza. The silent Siva remains still [as Daksinamurti]. But the same Siva [in another form of his] keeps dancing all the time and it was from his dance that the science of language was born.  

Nataraja is the name of the dancing Paramesvara. "Nata" is a member of a troupe which also consists of the "vita" and "gayaka". The nata dances. Nataraja is the king of all dancers-- he who cannot be excelled as a dancer-- and he is also called Mahanata [the great dancer]. The Amarakosa, the Sanskrit lexicon, has these two words: " Mahakalo mahanatah". In Tamil they say " Ambala- k-kuttaduvan". We find from royal inscriptions that in the old days Brahmins too had such Tamil names-- " Ambala-k-kuttaduvan Bhattan", for instance.  

There used to be a publishing establishment in Bombay called the NirnayaSagara Press. It once brought out old poetical works in Sanskrit under the general name, " Kavyamala Series ". There were some books in this series with the name " Pracinalekhamala" . Reproduced in one of them is the text of a copper-plate inscription belonging to the Vengi kingdom. Vengi is situated between the Godavari and the Krsna.  

 

The Cola rulers of the Telugu country and the Colas of Tanjavur were related by marriage. Rajaraja Cola (Narendra) reigned in Tanjavur; it was he who built the Brhadisvara temple. Kulottunga Cola who belonged to the family of the grandson of a king of Vengi ruled as a member of the Cola dynasty of Tanjavur. Once he visited the Cola kingdom and on his return took some 500 Brahmins with him to promote Vedic learning in Vengi. The "Dravidalu" of Andhra Pradesh are the descendants of these Brahmins.  

 

The names of all these Brahmins and their gotras are mentioned in the copper-plate inscription together with the subjects in which they were proficient and duties they had to perform. The landed property allotted to each is referred to, so also the names of the donors and of the recipients. The Brahmins from Tamil Nadu had to teach the Vedas and sastras. That is why gifts of lands were made to them.  

 

" Rupavatara-vaktuk eko bhagah": these words are from the inscription. It means " one share to the Brahmin who is proficient in the Rupavatara. " Rupavatara is a work on grammar.  

 

In Ennayiram, near Tindivanam (Tamil Nadu), there was a school with 340 students. Of them 40 studied Rupavatara, says an inscription of Rajendra Cola I. In Tribhuvanam, Pondicerri(Pondicherry), also there was a Vedic school supported by Rajadhiraja (A. D. 1018-1050) where the Rupavatara was taught. We also learn from an inscription of Vira-Rajendra Devam dated A. D 1067, that this grammatical work was taught at a school in Tiru, ulldal, near Kanchi.  

 

Siddhanta-Kaumudi is a very popular treatise on grammar. It is a commentary on Panini's sutras by Bhattoji Diksita who was a disciple of Appayya Diksita. The latter was born in Adayappalam and was the author of 104 works, many of them on Saiva themes. His Kuvalayananda, a work on poetics, is also famous.  

 

Ardha-matra-Iaghavena putrotsavam  

manyante vaiyakaranah 

 

This speaks of the great joy experienced by grammarians: if they gain as much as half a matra it is a cause for jubilation like the birth of a son to a man who has been long childless.  

 

The sutras are very brief and very precise. The Siddhanta- Kaumudi is also famous for its brevity and exactitude; there is no circumlocution in it, no beating about the bush. May be the sutras themselves are wordy but not Bhattoji Diksita's commentary on the same. Written some 400 years ago, it is very popular even today and is the first book of grammar prescribed for students. (Bhattoji Diksita also wrote the Tattavakaustubha and dedicated it to his guru, Appayya Diksita. In this he seeks to establish that there is no Truth other than the Brahman and that, to claim that there is, is not in keeping with the teachings of the Upanisads. Bidden by his guru, he also wrote an attack on Madhvacarya's philosophy of dualism. The work, Madhvamatavidhvamsanam, is a cause of dispute among philosophers but Bhattoji Diksita's commentary on grammar is acceptable to all systems. ) 

 

Before Siddhanta-Kaumudi, Rupavataram was the grammar work famous among students. "Rupam" here means the "complete form of sound"; "avataram" is descent, but in the present context "history". Rupavataram was published by Rangacari, of Presidency College, Madras.  

 

That gifts of land were made to scholars who taught Rupavataram [the reference here is to the Vengi inscription], shows the importance attached to sanskrit grammar in those times.  

 

The Vengi inscription dates back to 850 years ago. As mentioned earlier, the names of Brahmins who received gifts are given in it. Many of them had the title "Sadangavid" (learned in the six Vedic Angas). Some had Tamil names -- "Ambala-k-kuttaduvan Bhattan", "Tiruvarangamudayan Bhattan", etc. Of the foregoing two names the first is associated with the Cidambaram temple which is Saiva and the second with the Srirangam temple which is Vaisnava . Both Brahmins were Smartas, even the one with the Vaisnava name. There has been as much devotion to Siva as there has been to Visnu at all times. In the North and in Kerala, even today, Smartas perform puja in all temples. The man called "Tiruvarangamudayan Bhattan" is not to be taken as a Vaisnava from his name. The Sanskrit equivalent of the name is Rangasvamin. "Udayan" means "svamin", "svam" denoting possession.  

 

The Tamil name of Nataraja is "Tiruvambala Kuttaduvan". I wanted to speak about Nataraja and his connection with grammar. Let us go back to the stanza with the first word, "Nrttavasane. . . " Nataraja performs an awe- inspiring dance. It seems to bring together all the dance that all of us have to perform, the rhythms of all our lives. The head of the Nataraja idol has something that seems spread over it, something falling down on both sides. What is it? It is the god's mass of matted locks. I am reminded of the snapshot photographs taken nowadays. A snapshot is a rapid photograph that captures an object in one of its fleeting moments. It is not a study that is static but one suggestive of motion. Nataraja dances fast, but momentarily seems to stop dancing. His matted locks give the impression of fanning out over the two sides of his face. The sculptor of those times seems to have taken a mental snapshot of that moment to create the image of Nataraja.  

 

Nataraja has a drum in one hand, called the dhakka or damaruka. The tala of this drum (the time kept by it) is in keeping with the "footwork" of the dancing god, the movement of his feet. The beat of his drum is referred to in the words, "nanada dhakkam".  

 

There are chiefly three types of musical instruments. Those made of skin like the dhakka, the tavil (drum accompaniment to nagasvaram music), the kanjira (a kind of hand drum), the mrdanga; stringed instruments like the vina, the violin; wind instruments like nagasvaram, the flute. The final beat of the drum is called cappu. Similarly at the end of Nataraja's dance (" nrttavasane ") the damaruka produced the cappu sound.  

When Nataraja dances, Sanaka and his brother sages, Patanjali Vyaghrapada and so on stand round him. They are great ascetics, so they are able to see the dance. Nataraja's dance can be seen only by those who have the inner vision of jnana. The Lord himself bestowed on Arjuna the divine eye with which the pandava could see his cosmic form. Vyasa imparted the same power to Sanjaya so that he could describe this wondrous form to Dhrtarastra. Only they (Arjuna and Sanjaya) could see Krsna's universal form. Others on the battlefield of Kuruksetra could not. Because of the great efforts made by them, the celestials, the sages and yogins obtained the divine eye to see the dance of Nataraja. In the Gita such sight is called "divya-caksus" (divine eye).  

Sanaka and others saw the dance with their real eyes. Visnu played the drum called the maddala, while Brahma kept time. At the close of the dance, the concluding beats(cappu) produced fourteen sounds. It is these fourteen that are referred to in the stanza ("Nrttavasane", etc) as "navapancavaram"; "nava" is nine and "panca" is five, so fourteen in all. "Nanada dhakkam navapancavaram. " If the number of sounds produced by Nataraja's dhakka is fourteen, the branches of Vedic learning are also the same number (caturdasavidya). If the foundation of Hindu dharma is made up of these fourteen vidyas, Nataraja'a cappu produced fourteen sounds which, according to the verse, were meant for the [Atmic] uplift of Sanaka and others. You must have seen in the sculptural representations of Daksinamurti in temples four aged figures by his side. They are the Sanaka sages. It is not Saiva works like the Tevaram and the Tiruvacakam alone that mention how instruction was given to the four but also the Vaisnava songs of the Azhvars.  

 

The fourteen sounds produced by Nataraja's drum are the means by which the reality of Siva is to be known and experienced within us in all its plenitude. Nandikesvara has commented upon the fourteen sounds in his Sivabhaktisutra.  

 

Among those present at Nataraja's dance was Panini. His story is told in the Brhatkatha which was written by Gunadhya in the Prakrt called Paisaci. Ksemendra produced a summary of it in Sanskrit and, based on it, Somadeva Bhatta wrote the Katha-sarat-sagara. It is the source of some of the stories of The Arabian Nights, Pancatantra and Aesop's Fables. Perunkathai is a Tamil version, the title being Tamil for Brhatkatha.  

The story of Panini is told in the Katha-sarit-sagara. In Pataliputra (modern Patna), in Magadha, there were two men called Varsopadhyaya and Upavarsopadhyaya - the second was the younger of the two. Upakosala was Upavarsopadhyaya's daughter. Panini and Vararuci were Varsopadhyaya's students. Panini made little progress in his lessons. So his teacher asked him to go to the Himalaya and practise austerities. The student did so and through the grace of Isvara received the power to witness the tandava dance of Nataraja. With this divine gift of the Lord, Panini indeed saw the tandava and heard the fourteen sounds at its conclusion. For him these sounds meant the fourteen cardinal sutras of grammar and on them he based his Astadhyayi. As its very name suggests, this work, which is the source book of Sanskrit grammar, has eight chapters.  

 

The fourteen sounds are recited at the upakarma ceremony. Since they emanated from the drum of Mahesvara(Nataraja), they are called "Mahesvarasutras". Human beings can produce only inarticulate sounds on the musical instruments played by them. The hand of Paramesvara is verily the Nadabrahman and Sabdabrahaman incarnate, so his cappu on the damaruka at the conclusion of his tandava sounded as a series(garland) of fourteen letters: 

 

1. a i un; 2. rlk; 3. e on; 4. ai auc; 5. hayavarat; 6. lan; 7. nama nana nam; 8. jha bha n; 9. gha da dha s; 10. ja ba ga da da s; 11. kha pha cha tha tha catatav; 12. kapay; 13. sa sa sar; 14. hal-iti Mahesvarani sutrani.  

 

When you listen to these sutras at the upakarma ceremony, you are amused. You repeat them after the priest without knowing what they are all about. They are the concluding strokes Siva made on his drum as he stopped dancing, stopped whirling round and round.  

 

We say, don't we, that the anklets sound "jal-jal", that the damaru sounds "timu-timu", that the tavil sounds "dhum-dhum"? These are not of course the sounds actually produced by the respective drums. Even so the words give us some idea of the beats. We don't say "pi-pi" to describe the sound of a drum or "dhum-dhum" to describe the sound of the pipe. The sound produced by plucking the strings of the instruments like the veena is usually described as "toyn-toyng". From this it follows that, thought the musical instruments do not produce articulate sounds, they create the impression of producing the phonemes of human speech. If this be so in the case of instruments played by humans, why should not the drum beaten by Nataraja during his pancakrtya dance produce articulate sounds? 

 

How did Panini make use of the fourteen sounds? He created an index from the sutras to vocalise the letters or syllables together. According to the arrangement made by him, the first letter or syllable of a sutra voiced with the last letter or syllable of another sutra will indicate the letters or syllables in between. For example, the first syllable of "hayavarat", "ha", and the last letter of "hal", "l", together make "hal". This embraces all the consonants in between. Similarly, the first letter of the first sutra, "a", and the last letter of the fourth sutra together form "ac"-this includes all the vowels. The first letter of the first sutra and the last letter of the fourteenth sutra together form "al" - it includes all letters.  

 

"Halantasya" is one of the sutras of Astadhyayi. "Al" itself has come to mean writing.  

 

"A-kara" is the first letter in all languages. In Urdu it is alif; in Greek it is alpha. Both are to be derived from "al". So too "alphabet" in English. Here is another fact to support the view that, once upon a time, the Vedic religion was prevalent all over the world.  

 

We know thus that the prime source of grammar is constituted by the Mahesvara-sutras emanating from the drum of Nataraja. Since Paramesvara was the cause of the sabda-sastras (all sciences relating to sound, speech), "grammar-pavilions" have been built in Siva temples, but not in Visnu shrines.  

 

By the side of Nataraja are Patanjali and Vyaghrapada. I had been to a temple near Sirkazhi(in Tamil Nadu). There, beside Nataraja, were Patanjali and Vyaghrapada. Beneath their images were inscribed their names. Patanjali's name was seen here as "Padamcolli" - the error must be attributed to the ignorance of the man who had inscribed the names. I was however happy that ironically enough, this name benefited the sage and that even ignorance was the cause of something appropriate. "Padam" has the meaning of grammar[as in] "padavakya pramana". Here "pada" means grammar. So "Padamcolli" [the second half of the name in Tamil] means one who "says" grammar.  

 

When I saw this inscription I was reminded of another thing. We speak of "gunaksara-nyaya". "Guna" here means an insect like the white ants which eats into wood and palm-leaves. Sometimes in this process letters are formed accidentally. If something meaningful results from an act committed unconsciously or unwittingly it is said to be according to the "gunaksara-nyaya". This term is thus applicable to Patanjali being written as "Padamcolli" 

 

Some years ago I happened to see the Sahitya-Ratnakara. The author of this poetical work is Yajnanarayana Diksita who composed it 400 hundred years ago during the reign of Raghunatha Nayaka of Tanjavur. Diksita was a great devotee of Siva and in one of his hymns there is a reference to grammar.  

 

Adau pani-ninadato' ksara-samamnayopadesena yah 

Sabdanamanusasananyakalayat sastrena sutratmana 

Bhasyam tasya ca padahamsakaravaih praudhasayam tam gurum 

Sabdarthapratipatti-hetumanisam Candravatamsam bhaje 

--- Sahitya-Ratnakara, 11. 124 

 

"Aksara-samamnayam" in this stanza means grammar, a grouping together of letters. Isvara's breath constitutes the Vedas. The wind produced by his hand [as he beats the drum] is "Aksara-Veda", the Mahesvara-sutras. It is called "sabdanusasanam". "Pani-ninadatah" means "produced sounds with your hands" or "the sounds came by to Panini". Thus the words have two meanings. The idea is that Panini created his grammar with the sounds produced by Isvara with his hand.  

 

The stanza goes on to say: "With the movement of your hand the sutras of grammar were created and with the movement of your feet its commentary has been produced. " Patanjali, author of the Mahabhasya, was an incarnation of the primordial serpent Adisesa. Adisesa is now the anklet of Parameshvara. It is in keeping with this that the poet says that Siva created the bhasya with the movement of his feet. He concludes by remarking that sound and meaning originate in Siva.  

 

In this way, Siva is the prime source of grammar. That is why there are mandapas in his temples where vyakarana is to be taught.  

 

Works on Grammar
(HinduDharma: Vyakarana)

 

In the stanza [in the previous chapter ] we saw that the poet calls Siva "Candravatamsa". It means the god who has the moon for a head ornament. "Candrasekhara" and "Indusekhara" mean the same. Remarkably enough, "Indusekhara" occurs in the titles of two grammatical works. One is Sabdendusekharam, and the other pariposendusekharam. A student who has read grammar up to Sabdendusekharam is considered master of the subject.

If there are thirty books on Siksa, there are any number on grammar. Foremost among them are Panini's sutras, Patanjali's bhasya for it and vararuci's vartika (mentioned earlier). I make this statement in the belief that Vararuci and Katyayana are the same person. Some think that they are not. Vararuci was one of the "Nine gems" of Vikramaditya 's court.

Bhartrhari's Vakyapadiyam is also an important grammatical treatise. There are said to be nine [notable] Sanskrit grammar works, "nava- vyakarana". Hanuman is believed to have learned them from the sun god. Sri Rama praises him as "nava-vyakarana -vetta ". One of these nine works is Aindram authored by Indra. It is said that the basic Tamil grammar book, the Tolkappiyam, follows Aindram.

Excerpts from Hindu Dharma by Kanchi S'ankaracharya, Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi

http://www.kamakoti.org/hindudharma/part7/chap2.htm 

 

 

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S. Kalyanaraman kalyan97@gmail.com 1 january 2007 

Sarasvati Research Centre, Akhila Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Yojana c